Mein Kampf
1922
- politics and government
- nationalsozialistische deutsche arbeiter-partei
- national socialism
- political science, germany
- germany, history, 1933-1945
- general
- famous persons -- autobiography
- politics -- germany -- autobiography
- national socialism -- autobiography
- germany -- politics and government -- 20th century
The story
1925 autobiographical book "My Struggle" (USA: "My Battle") by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler On April 1, 1924, because of the sentence handed down by the People's Court of Munich, I had to begin that day, serving my term in the fortress at Landsberg on the Lech. Thus, after years of uninterrupted work, I was afforded for the first time an opportunity to embark on a task insisted upon by many and felt to be serviceable to the movement by myself. Therefore, I resolved not only to set forth, in two volumes, the object of our movement, but also to draw a picture of its development. From this more can be learned than from any purely doctrinary treatise. That also gave me the opportunity to describe my own development, as far as this is necessary for the understanding of the first as well as the second volume, and which may serve to destroy the evil legends created about my person by the Jewish press. - Preface.
What it’s like
Dense, airless prose that reads like a long harangue delivered at full volume: sentences pile clause upon clause, the voice swings between self-pity, bluster and lectured certainty, and the same grievances recur like a drumbeat. The sensory world is mostly rooms and crowds, the cramped fortress at Landsberg, beer halls, street meetings, with little light or landscape to rest the eye. The mood is grim, claustrophobic and sour, suited to a deliberate daytime study session rather than a relaxed evening. Pacing is slow and circular, returning again and again to the same enemies and a self-mythologizing account of a young man's rise, so the arc is one of grievance hardening into conviction. Intensity is high without graphic content: no gore or sexual material, but pervasive explicit antisemitism, dehumanising racist language, and open advocacy of violence and conquest, which lands as oppressive rather than shocking in its flat tone. It is for historians, students of propaganda and rhetoric, and readers who need the primary source, not for anyone seeking comfort or gentle escape.
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