Hitler

sojourn, so to speak, in the desert. Max Amann, the book’s publisher, had apparently expected a memoir of quite another sort, full of political revelations. He was at first terribly disappointed by the stiff, long-winded, and boring manuscript.

Konrad Heiden, Hitler’s biographer, believed that Hitler had made a pact with the authorities not to divulge too much about the recent conspiracy. That may or may not be so. But in any case, it seems certain that Hitler’s ambition aimed higher than the kind of recital that Amann envisaged. Hitler saw his chance to give a deeper rationale to his recently developed claim to leadership and to show himself as that compound of politician and theoretician that he had invoked as the only possible savior for the country. Here, in an inconspicuous spot midway in the first part, is a passage that reveals his true aims:

For if the art of the politician is really the art of the possible, the theoretician is one of those of whom it can be said that they are pleasing to the gods only if they demand and want the impossible…. In long periods of humanity, it may happen once that the politician is wedded to the theoretician. The more profound this fusion, however, the greater are the obstacles opposing the work of the politician. He no longer works for necessities which will be understood by any shopkeeper, but for aims which only the fewest comprehend. Therefore, his life is torn by love and hate….

The rarer [is] success. If, however, once in centuries success does come to a man, perhaps in his latter days a faint beam of his coming glory may shine upon him. To be sure, these great men are only the Marathon runners of history; the laurel wreath of the present touches only the brow of the dying hero.⁴

The book constantly reinforces the insinuation that Hitler is in fact this prodigy. The image of the dying hero can be construed as an attempt to give a cast of tragic nobility to the recent defeats. Hitler went at the job with an application that was rare for him. Here was his chance to prove that despite his lack of schooling, despite his failure to be admitted to the Academy, despite his humiliating past in the home for men, he had reached the lofty heights of bourgeois culture. It may have seemed that he was doing nothing, but all through the years he had thought long and hard and could offer not only an interpretation of the present but also an outline for the future. Such were the pretensions that went into the making of Mein Kampf.

Behind the front of bold words lurks the anxiety of the half-educated author that his readers may question his intellectual competence. He tries to make his language imposing by stringing together long series of nouns, many of them formed from adjectives or verbs, so that they sound empty and artificial. Taken as a whole, it is a language that lacks all natural ease; it can scarcely move or breathe:

I again immersed myself in the theoretical literature of this new world, attempting to achieve clarity concerning its possible effects, and then compared it with the actual phenomena and events it brings about in political, cultural and economic life…. Gradually I obtained a positively granite foundation for my own convictions, so that since that time I have never been forced to undertake a shift in my own inner view on this question.[6]⁵

Several of Hitler’s followers put in long hard hours editing the book, but they could not weed out the stylistic slips and infelicities that were part and parcel of Hitler’s verbose, pseudoeducated manner. Thus we find the text studded with such phrases as “the rats that politically poison our nation” gnawing the meager education “from the heart and memory of the broad masses,” or “the flag of the Reich” springing “from the womb of war.” Rudolf Olden has pointed out the numerous absurdities of Hitler’s overwrought style. The following, for instance, is a typical Hitlerian metaphor. He is speaking of privation: “He who has not himself been gripped in the clutches of this strangulating viper will never come to know its poisoned fangs.” Olden comments: “That one sentence contains more mistakes than one could correct in an entire essay. A viper has no clutches, and a snake which can coil itself around a human being has no poison fangs. Moreover, if a person is strangled by a snake, he never comes to know its fangs.”⁶

Yet, along with all the pretentious and disordered thoughts, the book contains some deep insights, born directly of Hitler’s profound irrationality, as well as many sharp formulations and striking images. Hitler’s stiffness and doggedness make a strange contrast with his longing for the flowing period, as does his search for stylization with his lack of selfcontrol. His attempts at logic are at variance with his dull repetitiousness, and the one element in the book that nothing counteracts is the monotonous, manic egocentricity. This corresponds only too well with the lack of human feeling and human beings in its many pages. The book may be tedious and hard to read. Yet it does convey a remarkably faithful portrait of its author, who in his constant fear of being unmasked actually unmasks himself.

Probably realizing that the book betrayed him, Hitler later tried to disassociate himself from it, describing it as a stylistically unfortunate collection of editorials for the Volkische Beobachter and dismissing it as “fantasies behind bars.” “This much I know, that if I had suspected in 1924 that I was to become Reichskanzler, I would not have written the book.” But at the same time he implied that his reservations were purely tactical or stylistic in nature: “As to the substance, there is nothing I would want to change.”

The book’s convoluted style militated against it; the almost 10 million copies ultimately distributed suffered the same fate as all works bought out of duty or to show political orthodoxy. It remained unread. Another discouraging element may have been the grim, compulsive quality of Hitler’s mind. As a speaker, amidst the fanfare of carefully prepared appearances, Hitler was apparently able to cover this up. But a curiously nasty, obscene odor emanates from the pages of Mein Kampf. It is strongest in the incredible and revealing chapter on syphilis, but it also rises out of the grubby jargon, the stale images, and the poor-mouth attitudes that represent his stylistic stance. The mixed-up young man, who throughout the war and the frenzied activity of the following years never managed to find more than motherly woman friends, and who, according to someone close to him, “was terrified of even chatting with a woman,” projects his own starvations and repressions onto the world. Stamped on his concepts of history, politics, nature, or human life, are the anxieties and lusts of the former inmate of the home for men. He is haunted by the images of puberty: copulation, sodomy, perversion, rape, contamination of the blood.

The final Jewish goal is denationalization, is sowing confusion by the bastardization of other nations, lowering the racial level of the highest, and dominating this racial stew by exterminating the folkish intelligentsias and replacing them by members of his own race…. Just as he himself [the Jew] systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization of other nations, lowering the racial level of the highest, and himself rising to be its master…. If physical beauty were today not forced entirely into the background by our foppish fashions, the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by bow-legged, repulsive Jewish bastards would not be possible…. Systematically these black parasites of the nation defile our inexperienced young blond girls and thereby destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world…. The folkish ideology must at last succeed in bringing about that nobler age in which men will no longer see it as their concern to breed superior dogs, horses and cats, but in the raising of man himself….⁷

The book’s peculiarly neurotic aura, its queerness, its fragmentary and disorganized quality, help account for the disdain so long accorded to the doctrines of National Socialists. “No one took it seriously, could take it seriously, or even understand this style at all,” wrote Hermann Rauschning.[7] He asserted, on the basis of his intimate background knowledge: “Hitler’s real goals… are not to be found in Mein Kampf.”⁸ With a good deal of persuasive brilliance Rauschning formulated a theory that widely influenced later historians, the theory that National Socialism was a “Revolution of Nihilism.” Rauschning maintained that Hitler and the movements he led had no ideas, no systematic ideology; the Nazis merely exploited existing moods and trends that would help to swell their membership rolls. A joke current in the 1930’s made a similar point: National Socialist ideology was referred to as “the World as Will without Idea.”[8] Rauschning felt that all the tenets of Nazism, nationalism, anticapitalism, the cult of ritual, foreign-policy goals, even racial theory and anti-Semitism were the sport of Hitler’s completely unprincipled opportunism. Hitler the opportunist, Rauschning argues, respected nothing, feared nothing, believed in