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.
Hitler, whom we suspect of being an embittered, envious, traumatized loser, presents himself as . . . an embittered, envious, traumatized loser. The weirdness of this is especially evident in the earlier autobiographical chapters. His resentments are ever-present. His father was dense, mean, unforgiving, and opaque. (“My father forbade me to nourish the slightest hope of ever being allowed to study art. I went one step further and declared that if that was the case I would stop studying altogether. As a result of such ‘pronouncements,’ of course, I drew the short end; the old man began the relentless enforcement of his authority.”) His schoolmates were combative, his schoolmasters unappreciative. The petty rancor and unassuaged disappointments of a resentment-filled life burn on every page, in ways one would think might be more demoralizing than inspiring to potential followers. His embittered account of his final rejection at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts is typical:
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.
Here we touch on a potentially absurd but also possibly profound point. The resemblance of Charlie Chaplin to Hitler is one of the fearful symmetries of twentieth-century life, one that could hardly have been imagined if it were not so—Chaplin even writes in his autobiography that, when he was shown postcards of Hitler giving a speech, he thought that the German leader was doing “a bad imitation” of him. There were, of course, millions of men with toothbrush mustaches, but the choice by a performer or politician to keep or discard a symbolic appurtenance is never accidental. Chaplin chose to use the mustache because, as Peter Sellers once said of the little mustache he placed on his petty-bourgeois hero, Inspector Clouseau, it is the natural armor of the insecure social classes. The twitch of the mustache is the focal point of the Tramp’s social nervousness, as much as his flat, awkward feet are the focal point of his ingenuousness. Chaplin’s insecurity-armor is gallant and Hitler’s aggrieved, but both wear the mustache to claim more social dignity than the wearer suspects society wants to give him. (Hitler seems to have been forced during the Great War to trim an earlier, more luxuriant mustache—the point is that he kept and cultivated the abbreviation.)
“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.
