Mindful
Diamond Member
- Banned
- #1
Mein Kampf] certainly has given more ammunition to Hitler’s enemies than to his friends, and any unprejudiced outsider who has the patience to finish the work is bound to conclude that its author is a self-educated man of very limited intelligence. Written in a maddeningly wooden style, in which hackneyed clichés alternate with windy rhetoric, full of rambling digressions and hysterical denunciations, it affords no insight whatever into Hitler’s own life and development. Anything he tells us about himself is merely introduced, as a peg on which to hang some political or ethnological dissertation. Commonplaces of history, politics and sociology are paraded as new and epoch-making discoveries; long-discarded theories are rescued from the lumber rooms of science and enunciated with all the pompous omniscience of a village schoolmaster. At times one is almost disarmed by the author’s naiveté; occasionally, too, one meets a gem of entirely unconscious humour. But for the most part the book makes sad reading, and anyone who has even attempted the task will readily understand why Hitler exalts the spoken over the written word.
Academics, naturally, were never Hitler’s constituency. Mein Kampf is a river of invective utterly bereft of nuance or grace. Apart from its tawdry contents, the rabid tone of the book will inevitably repel finer or more reasonable minds. The disdain for accuracy or nuance, however, is a clue to the book’s power. First of all, it allows Hitler to occupy the terrain of his opponents, the Social Democrats, without the need accurately to present their activities or record as a party, and to denounce populist, Marxist-inspired workers’ movements and trade unions while promoting his political vision as a form of socialism. Any reader who carries with them to Mein Kampf a vague notion of historical Marxism as the chief bogeyman of the bourgeoisie and repository of the hopes of workers will be surprised at Hitler’s sponsoring the cause of workers and heaping scorn on “the bourgeois parties” in the same breath as denouncing Marxism (for the essence of its message, as well as for being an alleged Jewish conspiracy). The Jewish conspiracy, Koschorke claims, was the crucial supplement by which Hitler radicalised his own position to distinguish it from the ideas of those whose clothes he had stolen: “Mein Kampf is constructed in such a way that confrontation with the Social Democrats and discussion of the ‘Jewish question’ relate to each other as problem and solution.”
Literarily Hitler
Academics, naturally, were never Hitler’s constituency. Mein Kampf is a river of invective utterly bereft of nuance or grace. Apart from its tawdry contents, the rabid tone of the book will inevitably repel finer or more reasonable minds. The disdain for accuracy or nuance, however, is a clue to the book’s power. First of all, it allows Hitler to occupy the terrain of his opponents, the Social Democrats, without the need accurately to present their activities or record as a party, and to denounce populist, Marxist-inspired workers’ movements and trade unions while promoting his political vision as a form of socialism. Any reader who carries with them to Mein Kampf a vague notion of historical Marxism as the chief bogeyman of the bourgeoisie and repository of the hopes of workers will be surprised at Hitler’s sponsoring the cause of workers and heaping scorn on “the bourgeois parties” in the same breath as denouncing Marxism (for the essence of its message, as well as for being an alleged Jewish conspiracy). The Jewish conspiracy, Koschorke claims, was the crucial supplement by which Hitler radicalised his own position to distinguish it from the ideas of those whose clothes he had stolen: “Mein Kampf is constructed in such a way that confrontation with the Social Democrats and discussion of the ‘Jewish question’ relate to each other as problem and solution.”
Literarily Hitler
