HITLER - MEMOIRS OF A CONFIDANT Edited by Henry Ashby Turner Jr. Translated by Ruth Hein. Illustrated. 333 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $29.95.

IN the funeral chapter of ''Ulysses,'' one of Joyce's characters tells the story of two drunks who are looking for the final resting place of a friend of theirs, Terence Mulcahy from the Coombe. They finally find it, and as one of them spells out the name, the other squints blearily up at the statue of the Saviour that their friend's widow has had erected over the grave. ''Not a bloody bit like the man,'' he says. ''That's not Mulcahy, whoever done it.''

This story comes powerfully to mind as one reads this record of conversations between Adolf Hitler and Otto Wagener in the years from 1929 to 1933, for the Fuhrer who emerges from ''Hitler - Memoirs of a Confidant'' is not the one whom we know from his own writings, accounts by other associates and his lurid career of crimes against peace and civilization. What is one to make of this new Hitler, who talks mawkishly and interminably about Christian virtues and defines his goal as the ''fulfillment of the sublime Christian idea of a socialist sense of community''? Far from wishing to exterminate the Jews, this Hitler insists, ''Like Christ, we must preach, 'You are all brothers! Love one another!' . . . We must not call one blood worse than another.''

He is so opposed to conflict that he is reluctant to arm his storm troops (SA) against their domestic opponents and agrees with Wagener that the time for large-scale international conflict is definitely past. This Hitler ''lived in an intellectual universe that differed from what we are accustomed to, [so] his conclusions, his utterances - yes, even his instructions . . . - could, in the hands of those who had to execute them, lead to consequences he neither intended nor foresaw.'' Faced with this image of Hitler, as an ''unwitting prisoner'' of Goring, Goebbels and Himmler, powerless to prevent his true intentions from being distorted by evil associates for their own criminal purposes, we have every reason to say, ''Not a bloody bit like the man.''

It would be unwise, however, to reject these memoirs out of hand simply because their author was so convinced the Fuhrer was ''a phenomenon that had . . . somehow [been] set by providence in the human world'' that he resolved to fashion a literary shrine to his memory. For this book, now translated by Ruth Hein, is not only or always bent on palliating Hitler's crimes, and when it is not, it is informative and often fascinating. Historians are not oversupplied with source materials on the years immediately before Hitler's accession to power in 1933, and despite its weaknesses, this record tells us a good deal we did not know about currents of thought, unresolved issues and conflicts of personality within the Nazi party during these critical years.

Nor is there any doubt about the competence of its author to speak about these things. Otto Wagener was a veteran of World War I, in which he served in the General Staff. After 1918, as a member of a volunteer Free Corps, he fought against the Bolsheviks in the Baltic lands and the Poles in Upper Silesia, and in 1920 he was involved in the unsuccessful Kapp putsch against the Weimar Republic and served a short term in prison. Throughout the 20's he continued to be active in rightist politics but also studied economics and became a successful businessman and a member of various trade associations, with a wide acquaintance in political, military and even academic circles. In the summer of 1929, he received an invitation to attend the National Socialist party congress in Nuremberg and was subsequently asked by Hitler to become chief of staff of the SA. From then until the beginning of 1933, he was a member of the Fuhrer's inner circle. Contact with Hitler was broken off abruptly in June 1933, and Wagener retired to pri-vate life until 1939, when he returned to the army as a captain. He had risen to the rank major general by the time he surrendered to the British on Rhodes in 1945, and he wrote his book in captivity. During 1931 and 1932, as SA chief of staff and head of the Nazi party's Economic Policy Section, Wagener was together with Hitler hundreds of times, for they both had offices in the party's headquarters, the Brown House in Munich, and Wagener accompanied Hitler on his frequent trips by car to various parts of Germany. The conversations he records cannot be taken as verbatim, since they were written down 14 years later. But they have value because they tell us what was on Hitler's mind in those years and what issues the party leaders were debating. T HEY make clear, for example, that, while Hitler never doubted he was going to achieve his goal of becoming Chancellor of Germany, he was not yet sure what he would do then. This was certainly true for economic policy, about which party debate became increasingly intense in 1931 and 1932, with Wagener trying to persuade Hitler to abandon economic liberalism and follow a socialist-corporatist line. It was also true of military policy, with Ernst Roehm, Wagener's successor as SA chief, arguing that he should be permitted to take over the Reichswehr and turn it into a revolutionary army. Both Wagener and Roehm lost their battles, but that outcome was not clear at the time of these conversations, and Wagener's mem-oir is doubly interesting because it reveals Hitler's noncommittal attitude; we get the sense that he is constantly weighing issues, not on their own merits but from a cold, pragmatic political point of view.

Of equal interest are the long conversations on for-eign policy, which show how firmly Hitler believed at that time in the necessity of gaining an alliance with Great Britain, even at the cost of forswearing colonies, and how muddled his views were about the United States. Notable also are the sometimes disjointed discussions about education and the tasks of German youth, about modern painting, about art and propaganda, as well as about party politics in the Weimar Republic. Finally, scattered through these pages is a fair amount of new information about Hitler's relations with women, particularly his niece Geli Raubal and Joseph Goebbels' wife, Magda, his views on homosexuality, his use of drugs and stimulants, his extensive reading and the bizarre social behavior of some of his associates.

All in all, then, there is little doubt that these memoirs are a rich treasury of information about Hitler and his party. But, as Henry Ashby Turner Jr., the Yale historian who is the editor of this volume, says in his penetrating introductory assessment of their historical importance, they should be read with a wary regard for the circumstances in which they were written and the biases of their author.

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