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For a modern reader, and by that I mean someone reading it today, as I have, on May 4, 2011, society is in almost every conceivable respect far removed from that in which Mein Kampf was written, though not without occasional ties – as I write these words today the last surviving soldier from World War I has died. Claude Choules was his name, he fought on the side of the British and was 110 years old. It is three days since Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan by U.S. special forces, a man often compared to Hitler, as so often happens with important enemies of the West and Western values, but even if there are some similarities, in their irreconcilable hatred of international capitalism, in the victim mentality expressed by terrorism, where the cause is always greater than the individual, who not only gives up his life in its service but does so gladly, the differences are at the same time so vast that any comparison is irrelevant, be it in the case of Bin Laden or anyone else who wears and has worn the face of evil since Hitler’s day, for instance Idi Amin, Papa Doc, Saddam Hussein. We are used to it always being the others, always the not-us, whereas Hitler was one of us, he pursued his will from within us, from our own European culture, and he did so as the leader of a community big enough not just to start a world war but to keep it going for five years, until twenty million human lives had been lost and the genocide of six million people had very nearly been completed, against which everything else simply pales. The most alien aspect of Hitler’s writing is not the politics, for although such radical nationalism is anathema to us, it is not unrecognizable or impossible to relate to, rather it is the hatred of the Jews, set forth with such vigor it is hard to conceive, in the sense that to us today it seems unthinkable that someone could actually mean what Hitler writes about the Jews in Mein Kampf.
The other striking thing about Mein Kampf relates indirectly to the first and has to do with the often unpleasantly base style its author employs, normally absent from the writing of the day, which is to say the age of the Weimar Republic. Style is little more than self-awareness, not in the singular I, but in the I of the text, arising in assumptions about the receiver of the communicative act. These assumptions exist as a kind of horizon of expectation against which the I defines and molds itself. Style is to the written text as morality is to behavior, setting the boundaries of what may and must be said or done, and how. If I write the word “cunt,” I am overstepping the boundaries set by normal style; if I do so fully cognizant of this it is because I am trying to achieve a certain stylistic effect, albeit not necessarily tastefully; as a provocation the word is devoid of meaning, mostly coming across as adolescent and almost impossible to use without it rubbing off adversely on the I of the text, unless of course it was being used as an example of a certain kind of language, to represent a character, to “say” something about that character. (After writing this, I added the word “cock,” so that the sentence instead began “If I write the words ‘cunt’ and ‘cock’…” and the reason I did this was because it struck me that “cunt” could arouse suspicions that I might be a misogynist, perhaps even afraid of women, having chosen that particular word, as if it were the most readily available, and in that way I might infelicitously be associated with Hitler – infelicitously because it might look like I was not aware of the fact, that I was blind to it, and around this point, my presumed misogyny and fear of women, a highly intricate web might then be spun out of whatever other indications might be discovered as to my lack of social intelligence, my sad and lonely life, and what I wrote about blood and grass, and all sorts of other things besides, could all be clustered around one single point of identification: Hitler. If such language occurs in a way that can be perceived as blind or unconscious, the entire credibility of the I may fall or be undermined, but if it occurs in a way that is clearly intended, and thereby calculated, it may in that case be perceived as heightening the relevance of the Hitler figure, perhaps even fleshing out the singular I of the text. Within that space, what the text knows and does not know about itself, tensions crackle always, though less so in texts in which the I is stylistically certain, precisely since it complies with all kinds of expectations the words create, having them under its control, knowing how to play on them, and that play, which takes place between reader and writer, two entities emerging in the very act of writing, becomes more invisible the more sophisticated the writer happens to be. That such play occurs is often impossible to discern before a certain time has elapsed, when what belongs to the age is no longer taken for granted, which is to say when the reader of the text is no longer a part of what the writer seeks to go toward. The writer’s motion toward, which begins in the expectation of the I, does not find a way to implant itself in the reader, and the very gesture of proceeding toward meeting a reader in a text becomes plain. The epochal mood exuded more or less by all writing, which for instance makes all texts from the 1950s similar in style, is to do with this. When I typed the word “cunt” and intuitively realized it could be read in a certain way in respect to the text as a whole, which is to say that I “felt” a certain viewpoint, “sensed” a certain line of thought directed toward unrecognized or suppressed misogyny, I added the word “cock” in order that the two words together might be a better signal of the rather stupid transgression I was trying to illuminate, without the gender imbalance that could arouse suspicions [probably justifiably, though that would be another discussion], until I realized that it was the very process I was seeking to describe that was at work here, the considerations one makes when writing, the boundaries the very act of communicating establishes, which make up the morality of the text.) If I were to type “nigger” or “spade,” the vast majority of cultured readers would turn away, such words being unacceptable, not because what they refer to, black people, cannot be named, but because they cannot be named in that way, with words so laden with contempt, used only by people who know no better because they grew up in parts of society that are largely uncultured in this sense, perhaps having been mistreated, now full of agression toward just about anyone and anything, which comes out in such expressions of the language, or else by people more cultured who know what they are doing, and who do so calculatedly, which is to say out of malice or spite, something which seldom occurs, no scientific paper would ever contain the word “golliwog” used in this way, no essay or newspaper article would contain the word “nigger,” no novel the word “spade” in this sense, other than to provide a picture of people in uncultured, which is to say socially deprived, areas of society. If someone from such areas of society is to express themselves in public, they must learn to command the style that is prevalent there, and if they do, its implicit moral judgments come with it, meaning such thoughts and notions as prevail in the uncultured domain are invariably kept out and suppressed, not by some dedicated strategy but as a result of the mechanisms society always has at its disposal to control what is undesirable and make sure it never gets a chance to rise to the level at which political decisions are made.
The boundary between what may not be said and the ways in which it may not be said is so unclear that sometimes they look like two sides of the same coin.
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Nearly all the literature of the Weimar years that is still read today, a striking number of classics coming out of Germany in the period 1919–33, is tasteful indeed, at the very highest cultural level in terms of style, and while to us the mind-set of that writing can be both outrageous and unacceptable, for instance Carl Schmitt’s definition of politics as the business of distinguishing between friend and foe, the consequence of which has to be the physical elimination of the foe, or Walter Benjamin’s notion of divine violence, we nonetheless accept that literature, studying it and discussing it in the same way as the unoutrageous, though taking care to state that such thinking is dangerous, that the texts in which it occurs are an exception, that they were produced in politically turbulent times. The mind-set is dangerous, but the style is exquisite, and for that reason we allow ourselves to handle them.
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Hitler’s Mein Kampf exhibits no style whatsoever, not even low style, its I simply gives vent to its opinions on a variety of different matters without at any time showing the slightest sign of being able to see itself; in other words it is uninhibited and excessive, seeking no legitimacy anywhere other than in its own self, which can say exactly what it wants because that is what it is, and because it knows no better. The I of Mein Kampf is self-congratulatory, self-centered, self-righteous, unrestrained, hateful, and small-minded, yet considers itself just and reasonable and grand, and it must have been this that resulted in such dismal reviews and meant that the book was never taken seriously, Hitler was showing his face without realizing it, revealing himself to be nothing more than an uncultivated, crude, and brutal man of the masses, who with his limited knowledge took a little here and a little there and stirred it about until ending up with something he thought was politics, but which was nothing more than a series of prejudices, anomalous opinions, and pseudo-scientific assertions. His strong anti-Semitism was another expression of the same thing. Anti-Semitism was widespread, although, as Hitler points out; in the quality newspapers and magazines it was nonexistent, they were above it, often to such an extent that they would refrain from addressing it, even though it was one of the major issues of the time. The newspapers and magazines in which it did find expression belonged to the lower levels of society, the vulgar and unrefined, and often, though not always, displayed contempt for all that was considered intellectual and high-cultural, not what belonged to the conservative middle class with its Wagner, but the culture of the growing avant-garde.
When the “Jewish question” was discussed at levels above these bubbling cauldrons of prejudice and stereotype, the language employed was without hatred and disgust, without visible emotion, but rational and investigative. In 1930, for example, toward the end of the Weimar period, the Süddeutsche Monatshefte devoted a special issue to “Die Judenfrage.” The editors justified the move by stating that the matter was one of the most pervasive and complex issues since the war: “The diversity of explanations, interpretations, and attacks directed toward the Jewish person from without corresponds to what seems to the outsider to be a confusing diversity of ambition in Jewish society itself.” The editors wanted as many voices as possible to be represented, Jewish as well as non-Jewish, Semitic as well as anti-Semitic. “We believe this to be the first time Jews and anti-Semites have collaborated in a single publication,” they noted.
Ernst Jünger’s contribution, Über Nationalismus und Judenfrage, concludes that the Jews in Germany were faced with the choice “either to be a Jew or not to be,” Heidegren writes, by which he meant that the Jews needed to retain their particular Jewishness in order to remain Jewish, and that the values that lay in that particular identity were under fire from the equalizing mind-set of economic liberalism. Like Hitler, Jünger saw international capitalism and Marxism as posing a threat to Germanness, both were nationalists, but the crucial difference was that for Jünger this sense of the individual, rather than being restricted to what was German, also pertained to others, including the Jews. Jünger holds up this notion of particularity and differentiation, the qualities deemed peculiar to an area, a culture, a people, a nation, as a counterweight to sameness and undifferentiation, and in that respect the problem becomes more the assimilation of the Jewish into the German, comparable to the assimilation of the German into the international, rather than Jewishness in itself. But even in this brief, rational, and stylistically formal essay, as far removed from Hitler’s prose as it is possible to get within the same culture, there are traces of anti-Semitism.
In order to be able to become dangerous, infectious, corrosive, it was necessary for him to first have a status that enabled him to be in his new figure, the figure of the civilized Jew. That status was created by liberalism, by the grand declaration of the independence of the spirit, and it likewise will be destroyed again by nothing but the complete bankruptcy of liberalism.
That the Jew was “dangerous, infectious, corrosive” was by no means an outrageous claim in 1930, for such assertions were common. Jünger ties this to a shift in culture whereby Jewishness lets go of itself and becomes German as a consequence of liberalism rather than of anything inherent in Jewishness itself, its nature or essence, and this is the big difference between Jünger’s utterance here and those of Hitler in Mein Kampf, yet it is impossible not to view them in the same context, for the elements are the same, Jewishness viewed as infectious and bound up with liberalism, and only that context – in which Jewishness was considered a problem, not only in the realm of the vulgar but also in that of the cultured, albeit far from universally so, and even among Jews themselves – for there were indeed anti-Semitic Jews – and Jewish identity, and what comprised it, was discussed without end throughout the interwar period – makes it possible to understand that a man such as Hitler, who had written such a book as Mein Kampf, in which anti-Semitism was the core from which everything radiated, could eventually end up chancellor of the Reich.
If we compare Hitler to one of the most important intellectuals of the same period, the Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno, this aspect of Mein Kampf becomes clear, for what would Adorno have made of it? He would have been unable to challenge it with his rational, finely tuned, unimaginably precise and subtle arguments, for there is nothing there to challenge, Adorno is at a level so far above Mein Kampf that he would not have been able to take it seriously, to consider it worthy of his attention. Had he done so, he would have elevated it to something it was not, lending it legitimacy by his very interest. He could have ridiculed it, as it was ridiculed elsewhere, but doing so would not have served any purpose; the only sensible strategy would be to pay it no heed. Mein Kampf was too base to be made the object of rational discussion, and as such could simply be rejected without argument.
Had Hitler not been self-taught, had he, say, studied philosophy during his time in Vienna and formulated the ideas put forward in Mein Kampf within that horizon, it would have been fair to discuss it, analyze it, dissect it, but that would not have been possible unless it had vented something other than was the case, the main thing about the book being that it has no such horizon, that its I does not direct itself toward any singular you, only toward a we, and stands furthermore outside that we. It is in the singular you that the obligation exists, and it is that obligation, which comprises a community, that makes a discussion possible. Hitler’s I lacks a you, is unbound by any obligation, and so ultimately is immoral, or devoid of morality in any sense. Jünger’s I possesses a you, meaning it can be argued against, for example by saying that the word “infectious” not only denotes something that spreads between humans, but also has strong connotations with sickness and disease, something pathological, and that the connection between liberalism and Judaism is too weak for the pathological aspect of the argument not to cling to the particularly Jewish, or to the Jew, who precisely in this way is construed as corrosive and dangerous, or disposed to be so, and in other words to be qualitatively apart from you and I, who are non-Jews, and surely you cannot claim this to be the case? But indeed I can, he would then be able to counter, or no, that’s not what I mean at all, but whatever he might say, the text and the opinions it makes manifest would be amenable to discussion, and Jünger and those who agreed with him would, in principle, be able to accept the counterargument and change their opinion accordingly, or adjust their arguments so as to reduce the risk of misunderstanding. In that process, which should not only be taken literally but also figuratively in terms of the conscious or unconscious reflection any text invites, between the singular I and its you, the boundary is set for what is possible and what is not possible to say in any day and age; this is where contemporariness exists, and crossing that boundary, which is also the boundary of obligation and morality, is only possible by transcending the you of the I, which presupposes that it is weak or nonexistent. Jünger did not, his assertion was good seen from the perspective to
what was acceptable in society at the time, and yet it was dubious. But dubious in respect for what? The law? The courts? Public to opinion? Societal norms?
An utterance being anti-Semitic cannot be relative, but the way we understand the anti-Semitic may indeed be relative. We explain Jünger’s utterance in terms of him being a right-wing nationalist, a glorifier of war, and a person held in esteem by Hitler, without that necessarily meaning he was a Nazi himself, and yet there is a connection, and on the basis of that contextualization we think to ourselves that he was indeed morally dubious, and consider his utterance about Jewishness in that light. But how are we to understand another person of the same generation, one of the twentieth century’s most significant literary figures, Franz Kafka, a Jew, writing disparagingly about the Jews? In a diary entry from August 6, 1914, he writes:
Patriotic parade. Speech by the mayor. Disappears, then reappears, and a shout in German: “Long live our beloved monarch, hurrah!” I stand there with my malignant look. These parades are one of the most disgusting accompaniments of the war. Originated by Jewish businessmen, who are Germans one day, Czech the next; admit this to themselves, this is true, but were never permitted to shout it out so loudly as they do now. Naturally they carry many others with them. It was well organized. It is supposed to be repeated every evening, twice tomorrow and Sunday.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 87