Hitler himself knew he could never win over the people through argument alone. The written word was of no use to him, it led to nothing. What he wanted was palpable action, he strove for transformation, and transformation took place in the moment, among the people. An opinion in the newspaper, hitting out against this or that, prompting a response in kind, an endless debate washing this way and that, was meaningless, nothing but words. Even in his book, Mein Kampf, he returns time and again to his distrust of the written word. Mein Kampf is about how a society can be changed starting at the very bottom, and in that it is pragmatic rather than fanatical. At one point he writes:
How hard it is to upset emotional prejudices, moods, sentiments, etc., and to replace them by others, on how many scarcely calculable influences and conditions success depends, the sensitive speaker can judge by the fact that even the time of day in which the lecture takes place can have a decisive influence on the effect.
This is the goal: to work other thoughts in behind the protective wall formed by prejudice, which is to say general, unreflected opinions. That protective wall cannot be penetrated by argument, for it is not made of arguments. It is made of a sense of what is right and wrong, what is decent, what is appropriate. To reach behind it into where such opinions reside and may be changed, one must proceed via the emotions. This requires great attention to the audience, whose self-image must not be violated, what is said must not appear alien – in such cases it will be rejected – but familiar, as something already belonging to them, something that is them. Hitler writes:
How hard it is to upset emotional prejudices, moods, sentiments, etc., and to replace them by others, on how many scarcely calculable influences and conditions success depends, the sensitive speaker can judge by the fact that even the time of day in which the lecture takes place can have a decisive influence on the effect. The same lecture, the same speaker, the same theme, have an entirely different effect at ten o’clock in the morning, at three o’clock in the afternoon, or at night. I myself as a beginner organized meetings for the morning, and especially remember a rally which we held in the Munich Kindl Keller as a protest “against the oppression of German territories.” At that time it was Munich’s largest hall and it seemed a very great venture. In order to make attendance particularly easy for the adherents of the movement and all the others who came, I set the meeting for a Sunday morning at ten o’clock. The result was depressing, yet at the same time extremely instructive: the hall was full, the impression really overpowering, but the mood ice cold; no one became warm, and I myself as a speaker felt profoundly unhappy at being unable to create any bond, not even the slightest contact, between myself and my audience. I thought I had not spoken worse than usual; but the effect seemed to be practically nil. Utterly dissatisfied, though richer by one experience, I left the meeting. Tests of the same sort that I later undertook led to the same result.
This should surprise no one. Go to a theater performance and witness a play at three o’clock in the afternoon and the same play with the same actors at eight at night, and you will be amazed at the difference in effect and impression. A man with fine feelings and the power to achieve clarity with regard to this mood will be able to establish at once that the impression made by the performance at three in the afternoon is not as great as that made in the evening. The same applies even to a movie. This is important because in the theater it might be said that perhaps the actor does not take as much pain in the afternoon as at night. But a film is no different in the afternoon than at nine in the evening. No, the time itself exerts a definite effect, just as the hall does on me. There are halls which leave people cold for reasons that are hard to discern, but which somehow oppose the most violent resistance to any creation of mood. Traditional memories and ideas that are present in a man can also decisively determine an impression. Thus, a performance of Parsifal in Bayreuth will always have a different effect than anywhere else in the world. The mysterious magic of the house on the Festspielhügel in the old city of the margraves cannot be replaced or even compensated for by externals.
Mein Kampf was published in 1925, after Growth of the Soil, The People of Juvik, Kristin Lavransdatter, Ulysses, and the first volumes of In Search of Lost Time, but before The Castle, Being and Time, and The Sound and the Fury. It is the most infamous book of our time, not because of what it says in itself, but because what it says was carried out in real life, and it is impossible to read Mein Kampf today without immense distaste, for something terrible and repulsive is attached to it, as if it were written by the devil himself. But at the time of its writing, its author, Adolf Hitler, was an ordinary man, he had not murdered anyone, had ordered no killings to be carried out, had stolen nothing and burned nothing to the ground. Had he not risen to power in Germany nine years later, nothing of what he wrote would have had any particular significance or overtone, the book would presumably be long since forgotten, existing only in a limited number of dusty volumes on the shelves of university libraries, borrowed on rare occasion by a doctoral student writing about the historical period and finding the work illustrative of some of its typical characteristics, not least the paranoid hatred of Jews. But Hitler did rise to power in 1933, and Mein Kampf now occupies a place apart in literature, wide open to the world: not only were the words on its pages transformed into real life, but what happened there, in real life, stains its each and every word; not a sentence can be read or quoted without thinking about the Nazis’ industrial extermination of the Jews and the millions who perished in World War II. It is almost impossible to read the book for what it once was, the work of a political fanatic outlining his personal background, analyzing society, and detailing what needs to be done in order to change it in the direction he wants. There is nothing gripping about it, nothing hypnotic or suggestive, and what little it says about its author and his life mutates into lengthy political ventings after barely a few lines. It has a smug, opinionated quality about it, for regardless of what aspect of society its author touches upon there is always something wrong with it, and moreover he knows exactly what it is and what needs to be done in order to put it right. Even the lambasting to which he often resorts gradually becomes rather mechanical. Mein Kampf is written in a tone of righteous indignation so powerful it must surely scare away anyone whose indignation by comparison falls short.
That the book takes the form of a bildungsroman, in which we follow the author from birth, through the first character-shaping years of childhood, and further into youth and the discoveries and fundamental insights of the young adult, has to do with the same thing: Hitler makes himself one with his politics, makes himself one with his role; what he believes and what he is are inseparable. Hitler builds up a persona in Mein Kampf, and that persona is his political platform. He is of the people, this is his message, and he knows the people’s problems, having experienced them himself; gradually he devises a comprehensive political solution, a vision thereby bound up with both the people and his own person, concentrated in the name, the signum of the work, Adolf Hitler.
Invariably, the personal experiences he describes are hooked up to the political, and if the book has any biographical axis at all, it is considered from such a remote distance that everything personal and private, relating only to him, to his own person and character, the idiosyncratic, vanishes from sight. These are the book’s first sentences:
Today it seems to me providential that Fate should have chosen Braunau on the Inn as my birthplace. For this little town lies on the boundary between two German states which we of the younger generation at least have made it our life work to reunite by every means at our disposal.
German Austria must return to the great German mother country, and not because of any economic considerations. No, and again no: even if such a union were unimportant from an economic point of view; yes, even if it were harmful, it must nevertheless take place. One blood demands one Reich. Never will the German nation possess the moral right to engage in colonial politics until, at least
, it embraces its own sons within a single state. Only when the Reich borders include the very last German, but can no longer guarantee his daily bread, will the moral right to acquire foreign soil arise from the distress of our own people. Their sword will become our plow, and from the tears of war the daily bread of future generations will grow. And so this little city on the border seems to me the symbol of a great mission.
Like any other memoir or autobiography, Mein Kampf begins with the main character’s birth. But no sooner are we informed of it than this “I” recedes into a “we,” so essential that the first thing it does there is to define its borders.
“We” is the people, and the people’s we stands above the we of the state by which it has been divided. The necessity of the we becoming united again stands above practical everyday politics and has its foundations in morality, finding its force in the body, that which is outside of language, nonargumentative, tangible, and physical: the blood. So essential is this that reunification takes precedence over the damage it will entail. Once this, the book’s utopia, has been accomplished, the practical consequences of it, the damage done, the country being unable to feed its people, will be rectified by way of the moral mandate that comes with being a united people, which is to say the conquering of new land. In less than half a page then, Hitler has both outlined his political program and associated it with his own person, born in Braunau on the Inn, a border town and thereby symbolic of this great task, the reunification of the two countries’ peoples into one, which he, child of the borderland, will carry out. This goal stands above everything else, and such is the symbolic and moral power of the reunifying act that it can transform a sword into a plow, tears into bread, war into peace.
After a page in this vein, the author returns to his point of departure and carries on the story of his origins:
In this little town on the Inn, gilded by the rays of German martyrdom, Bavarian by blood, technically Austrian, lived my parents in the late eighties of the past century; my father, a dutiful civil servant, my mother giving all her being to the household, and devoted above all to us children in eternal, loving care.
Hitler was born in 1889 in a town far from the world, provincial and unimportant in every sense, into an ordinary family of the lower middle class. He did not feel himself particularly attached to the place, the family moving elsewhere when he was three years old. Its description as being gilded by the memory of German martyrdom, with Bavarian blood running through its veins, places us partly in the obscure and magical world of myth, partly in the late-nineteenth-century Austrian provinces. The outline of his mother, her looking after the household and devoting herself lovingly to the care of her children, is the only thing said of her in the entire book. There is no mention of the fact that she was related to her husband by blood and pregnant when she married him some six months after his first wife had been put in her grave. Nor are we told that the three children to whom she gave birth before Adolf all died, one, a girl, at the age of two, or that the boy she had after Adolf, Edmund, died when he was six. How many siblings Hitler had, what their names were and what kind of feelings he had toward them, are all passed by. They are mentioned merely as “us children.” The father is the only person in Hitler’s life, during his first thirty-five years, to be described in more than a few words and accorded some biography. Like everyone belonging to Hitler’s closest family in Mein Kampf, he appears without a name.
Of “my father,” Hitler writes that he was from poor circumstances, son of an impoverished cottager, who ran away from home at the age of thirteen, determined to make something of himself and become a civil servant, the most respected position he had heard of, succeeding at the age of forty, retiring at fifty-six to purchase a small farm at Lambach in Upper Austria. The book tells us nothing of his relationship with his family or Hitler himself. Where the mother is loving and devoted in relation to her children, the father is “a dutiful civil servant.” His social trajectory is described in sentimental terms. He is the “poor boy” from the village with “all the tenacity of a young man whom suffering and care had made old while still half a child.” Moreover he was born outside wedlock, a bastard child, to all intents and purposes a nobody. Hitler does not deny his father’s poor circumstances and low social status, instead making a point of it in a narrative about the power of will and independence. Certainly, Hitler makes no explicit mention of illegitimacy. The description of his father returning after a long and hard-working career to the life his own father had led is part of the same embellishment of the gilded German town of Hitler’s birth. This is an idea of lineage, which basically means being born of somebody else, there is in essence nothing qualitative about the concept, nor in the expression to be of “one blood,” since blood is in all of us and all of us are born into some lineage. “Lineage” and “blood” create similarity and in this instance elevate, into these concepts vanish the miserable circumstances of life, the low social status of the illegitimate child, and this too is the sense such words are ascribed in Hitler’s politics, erasing social divides and making everyone a part of the same thing. Lineage and blood are nature; class and status are culture, and in Hitler’s image of the world the former governs. As he later writes when discussing the issue of rapidly increasing population:
While Nature, by making procreation free, yet submitting survival to a hard trial, chooses from an excess number of individuals the best as worthy of living, thus preserving them alone and in them conserving their species, man limits procreation, but is hysterically concerned that once a being is born it should be preserved at any price. This correction of the divine will seems to him as wise as it is humane, and he takes delight in having once again got the best of Nature and even having proved her inadequacy. The number, to be sure, has really been limited, but at the same time the value of the individual has diminished; this, however, is something the dear little ape of the Almighty does not want to see or hear about.
For as soon as procreation as such is limited and the number of births diminished, the natural struggle for existence which leaves only the strongest and healthiest alive is obviously replaced by the obvious desire to “save” even the weakest and most sickly at any price, and this plants the seed of a future generation which must inevitably grow more and more deplorable the longer this mockery of Nature and her will continues.
Here, mankind is reduced to numbers, the aggregate being decisive, determinative of power, expressing the will of nature, which is the same as the divine will, and the nameless individual who succumbs to hunger or sickness has no right to life. Keeping such individuals alive is “humane,” and thereby counter to nature. Such a perspective was by no means unique to Hitler, it was everywhere in the age and would not have been possible without Darwin and his unprecedentedly influential book, On the Origin of Species, in which all living creatures were considered through the same lens of evolution, this mighty power which through its very few laws has conveyed life from its monocellular origins in the great oceans to the huge complexities of the human. The fittest live on, and thus our life-bearing properties are steadily improved and refined, and since life is one long struggle the fittest are often the strongest, and that thought, translated to the social and the civilizational, comprises a pillar of Mein Kampf, one of the immovable premises from which the rest of its ideology issues. Nature is above culture. In nature the sick die, the weak die, the tardy die, the injured die. The brutality and cruelty of according this same principle so very central a status in culture lies in the worth of the human, the humane, being so radically diminished. A single human life is of little value in Mein Kampf.
But what is of value? The ideal a person can express, or be an expression of, this is of greater value than life. This is what lies behind dying for a cause, the idea that there is something greater, something one lives for and which is understood to be of such manifest importance that a person would be willing to give up his life for it.
Life is not primary.
&n
bsp; Hitler wrote his book in 1924, six years after four million young men had slaughtered each other in the trenches of Europe, a shadow that lay over all that was to be thought and written in the years that followed. In the autumn of 1914 a human life was infinitely more worthless than in the autumn of 1913. World War I was an abyss, a near-unfathomable crisis of civilization, and one of the most important issues that needed to be addressed in its wake was precisely the worth of the human being. To understand Mein Kampf, one must understand this.
* * *
This is the overarching societal perspective to which the book belongs and by which it is steered, but there is a personal perspective too, the I of its writer, the close and proximate world in which he grew up and by which he was formed, with his conscientious father, the civil servant, and a mother who gave “all her being to the household, and devoted above all to us children in eternal, loving care.” In this proximate world death too was close, and if the three children who died before Hitler was born were mentioned only rarely during his childhood and upbringing, they must surely have been present in the minds of his parents, in particular his mother, who sources unanimously describe as serious and mournful. Child mortality was high in those days, to lose three children was by no means unusual. August Kubizek, Hitler’s childhood friend, likewise had three siblings die before he was born, and the fact of death being so common must have made life seem at once more and less valuable. Less valuable in the sense that death was something to be reckoned with; the death of one’s first three children must have made the death of the fourth a perilously proximate possibility. More valuable in the sense that the one who survived would be the only one, correspondingly precious.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 57