In "The Hitler of History", inspired by the example of Pieter Geyl's book, "Napoleon For and Against", Lukacs examines the state of Hitler scholarship and offers his own observations about Hitler. In Lukacs's view, Hitler was a racist, nationalist, revolutionary and populist. Lukacs criticizes Marxist and liberal historians who claim that the German working class were strongly anti-Nazi and argues that the exact opposite was the case. Each chapter of "The Hitler of History" is devoted to a particular topic, such as whether Hitler was a reactionary or revolutionary; a nationalist or a racist; and he examines the roots of Hitler's ideology. Lukacs denies that Hitler developed a belief in racial purity in Vienna under the Habsburg monarchy. Instead, Lukacs dates Hitler's turn to antisemitism to 1919 in Munich, in particular to the events surrounding the Bavarian Soviet Republic and its defeat by the right-wing "Freikorps". Much influenced by Rainer Zitelmann's work, Lukacs describes Hitler as a self-conscious, modernizing revolutionary. Citing the critique of National Socialism developed by German conservative historians such as Hans Rothfels and Gerhard Ritter, Lukacs describes the Nazi movement as the culmination of the dark forces which lurk within modern civilization.