Does “Mein Kampf” Remain a Dangerous Book?
Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is being published and sold in Germany for the first time since the Second World War.
There was a lot said last week about the reëmergence, in Germany, of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”)—which just became legal to publish and sell there, for the first time since the end of the Second World War, albeit in a heavily hedged “scholarly” edition. Did providing a public place for the autobiographical testament of the Nazi dictator, written when he was briefly imprisoned in Bavaria, in the nineteen-twenties, in some way legitimize it, people asked, even if the text was surrounded by a trench work of scholarly addenda designed to italicize its lies and manias?
I read “Mein Kampf” right through for the first time last year, while working on a piece about Timothy Snyder’s history of the Holocaust as it happened in the Slavic and Baltic states during the Second World War. (Snyder reads Hitler in a somewhat original and provocative way, derived in part from his reading of “Mein Kampf.”) I read it in the first English translation, from 1933, with the German version alongside, online, and a crib of graduate-school German grammar nearby. (I’ve since reread sections, in Ralph Manheim’s later translation.) The question of what to do with “Mein Kampf” is, in some sense, independent of the book’s contents—buying it is a symbolic act before it’s any kind of intellectual one, and you can argue that it’s worth banning on those grounds alone. A good opposing case can be made on similarly symbolic grounds: that making it public in Germany is a way of robbing it of the glamour of the forbidden.
However that may be, the striking thing about the text as a text is that it is not so much diabolical or sinister as creepy. It is the last book in the world that you would expect a nascent Fascist dictator to write. Most of us—and most politicians in particular, even those who belong to extremist movements—try to draw a reasonably charismatic picture of our histories and ourselves. We want to look appealing. An evil force may emerge and temporarily defeat the narrator, but that force is usually placed against a childhood of a purer folk existence, now defiled. That’s the way most politicians’ campaign memoirs still work, for instance.
I had set out with a pile of drawings, convinced that it would be child's play to pass the examination. At the Realschule I had been by far the best in my class at drawing, and since then my ability had developed amazingly; my own satisfaction caused me to take a joyful pride in hoping for the best. . . . I was in the fair city for the second time, waiting with burning impatience, but also with confident self-assurance, for the result of my entrance examination. I was so convinced that I would be successful that when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue. Yet that is what happened. When I presented myself to the rector, requesting an explanation for my non-acceptance at the Academy's school of painting, that gentleman assured me that the drawings I had submitted incontrovertibly showed my unfitness for painting.
The triviality of the injury and the length and intensity with which it’s recalled—in a book intended, after all, to attract fanatical followers to a fanatical cause—would seem to be more unsettling than seductive. And many similar passages of equally irrelevant self-pity follow. His description of his hunger while footloose in Vienna is pointillist.
Mussolini’s autobiography, to take the obvious comparison, though ghostwritten—by a former American Ambassador to Italy, apparently!—nonetheless reflects his sense of the best self to put forward; the youthful memories are more predictably of a concord between the young Italian and the national landscape he inhabits. (The Masons play the same role for Mussolini that the Jews did for Hitler: the cosmopolitan force interrupting the natural harmony between the people and their home, the blood and the birthplace.) Mussolini’s is a Fascist dictator’s memoir written as you would expect a Fascist dictator to write it. To be sure, Hitler is writing at the bottom of the ascent and Mussolini at the top, but the temperamental difference is arresting nonetheless.
Indeed, strangely, the "lesser" Fascist and extreme right-wing European figures of the period are closer to the idealized image of a national savior than Hitler even pretends to be. Corneliu Codreanu, in Romania, for instance—who was, hard to believe, an even more violent anti-Semite than Hitler—was a model of the charismatic national leader, providing a mystical religious turn as well. Even Oswald Mosley, in England—for all that P. G. Wodehouse nicely mocked him in his figure of Roderick Spode—had many of the traits of a genuinely popular, charismatic figure, worryingly so. Hitler’s self-presentation has none of that polished charisma. He is a victim and a sufferer first and last—a poor soldier who is gassed, a failed artist who is desperately hungry and mocked by all. The creepiness extends toward his fanatical fear of impurity—his obsession with syphilis is itself pathological—and his cult of strong bodies. Pathos is the weirdly strong emotion, almost the strongest emotion, in the memoir.
Yet the other striking—and, in its way, perhaps explanatory—thing about the book is how petty-bourgeois (in the neutral, descriptive sense that Marx, or, for that matter, Kierkegaard, used the term) its world picture is, even including the petty-bourgeois bias toward self-contempt. The class nature of Hitler’s experience is as clear to him as it is to the reader—he is, he knows, a child of the lower middle classes, and his view of the world is conditioned by that truth.
His pervasive sense of resentment must have vibrated among those who know resentment as a primary emotion. Creepy and miserable and uninspiring as the book seems to readers now, its theme of having been dissed and disrespected by every authority figure and left to suffer every indignity must have resonated with a big chunk of an entire social class in Germany after war and inflation. Even his Jew-hating bears the traces of personal rancor as much as of “scientific” racial ideology. The poison of anti-Semitism comes in many flavors, after all, but the kind that, for instance, Drumont, in France, or Chesterton and Belloc, in Britain, had until then favored was aristocratic in pretension. It assumed that Jews have a secret, conspiratorial power. Admiration is mixed with the disgust, as with the parallel “yellow peril” of the Asians—they’re so smart that they’re sinister.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism seems a purer case of petit-bourgeois paranoia. It resents not the newcomer who invades the sanctuary but the competitor in the shop down the street, who plays by unfair rules. (“I didn’t know what to be more amazed at: the agility of their tongues or their virtuosity at lying.”) It’s telling that his anti-Semitism in “Mein Kampf” is, early on, entangled with his Francophobia. The Jews are like the French: they are, in plain English, the people who get to go to art school. Both the Francophobia and the anti-Semitism are part of the same petty-bourgeois suspicion: They think they’re superior to us! They think they’re better than us because they’re slicker than we are! They look down on us, and it is intolerable to have anyone look down on us! That fear of mockery and of being laughed at is so strong in Hitler that it filled his speeches as late as the onset of the war: the Jews and the English are laughing at me, and they won’t be allowed to laugh for long! That someone would feel this sense of impending shame as a motive for violence is commonplace. But that someone would choose to make so overt his love of violence arises from a fear of being mocked, and that he would use this as the source of his power seems weirdly naked and unprotected.
“Mein Kampf” is a miserable book, but should it be banned? I could certainly sympathize with any German who would like to see it kept illegitimate; some speech should, in fact, be off-limits. But is it a dangerous book? Does it circulate sinister ideas best kept silent? Putting aside the book’s singularly creepy tone, it contains little argumentation that wasn’t already commonplace in other, still-circulating anti-Semitic and extreme-right literature. Hitler’s character remains bewildering, in the obvious mismatch between the extent of his miserableness and the capacity of his will to power, although perhaps it should not be—many other personal stories suggest that miserable people have the will to power in the greatest intensity. But his themes are part of the inheritance of modernity, ones that he merely adapted with a peculiar, self-pitying edge and then took to their nightmarish conclusion: the glory of war over peace; disgust with the messy bargaining and limited successes of reformist, parliamentary democracy and, with that disgust, contempt for the political class as permanently compromised; the certainty that all military setbacks are the results of civilian sabotage and a lack of will; the faith in a strong man; the love of the exceptional character of one nation above all others; the selection of a helpless group to be hated, who can be blamed for feelings of national humiliation. He didn’t invent these arguments. He adapted them, and then later showed where in the real world they led, if taken to their logical outcome by someone possessed, for a time, of absolute power. Resisting those arguments is still our struggle, and so they are, however unsettling, still worth reading, even in their creepiest form.
The first German edition of “Mein Kampf” since 1945 will be published in January. Gerhard Weinberg says it’s about time.