This is a stupidly long book, and I have a lot of notes. It’s also a very poorly structured book, and he jumps around a lot; I tried to reorganize my notes into something cohesive after the fact, around themes of Antisemitism, Authoritarianism, Blood and Soil, Marxism, and anti-Zionism.
He says that his father found antisemitism to be “backward,” and I think it’s interesting that he grew into antisemitism later in life, rather than being raised with it. There’s a lot of animosity towards his father for trying to push him into civil service instead of art school, and I think he feels superior and enlightened in his antisemitism.
He claims that — at least in the 1920s — he “didn’t wish to see the Rhineland massacres repeated.” This book was published over a decade before the Nazis agreed on the Final Solution; I’m incredibly curious what swayed him in that time (Maybe the stock market crash? Maybe he’s just posturing?).
In the middle of chapter two, he picked up the Protocols for the first time, and the shift is dramatic. Up until this point, he wrote like a fairly normal turn-of-the-century German nationalist; after this, he committed himself obsessively to Jew-hate.
“In the course of centuries, the outward appearance of Jews had become Europeanized and taken on a human look — they could even be mistaken for Germans.” I think this is the deep anxiety of Germanness that doesn’t transfer clearly into modern racial conceptions. Hitler’s main problem with Jews is that they break the boundaries of Germanness; he considers this unnatural and profane. If you could mistake a Jew with Jewish blood for a German with pure, superior, Aryan blood, then what did it mean to be German? Was all blood-and-soil race science made up and meaningless? In order to prove German superiority, German Jews could not exist, and the fact of their existence was terrifying. If their mere existence undermined Germanness, then any Jewish action had to be a sinister threat to the German nation.
“Was it possible that the Earth had been promised as a reward to this people which lives only for the Earth?” “By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” Echoes of incredibly early Christian anti-Judaism here; there was a deep Platonic undercurrent to the theology. Christians belonged to the Realm of Forms, in a spiritual transcendence of this world for the next, and Jews, who were more occupied with living well for the sake of this world rather than the next one, were backwards, base, and materialistic.
In that vein, he thinks the Talmud is evil because it teaches you how to have a good life in this world instead of concerning yourself with the afterlife.
I was not aware how much of a religious war this was for Hitler. He claims to be “chosen by heaven to proclaim its will,” compares himself to Jesus multiple times, and his personal enemies are also the “enemies of G-d.”
“In political matters, feeling often decides more correctly than reason.” If I had to summarize the ideas of this book in one sentence, this would be it.
Western democracy is “dirty, false, and Jewish.” Hitler’s Glorious German democracy is, charitably, the governing structure laid out in Hobbes’ Leviathan.
We’re going beyond miscegenation laws. He believes it’s unhealthy to have relationships between the rural and the city population. Considering he and his family jumped between the two often, I’m very curious which one he thinks he counts as.
He categorizes the whole field of economics as a “Jewish study,” which does explain a lot of the financial decisions of the Third Reich. Moreover, any academic writing which doesn’t come to the same conclusions as him is simply false, corrupt, Jewish intelligentsia.
He admires the structure of the Catholic Church because it’s organized around the Pope. He really venerates the efficiency of a supreme leader, and alludes to Great Man Theory often.
Western Democracy, we are told, is the beginning of Marxism. He is fundamentally incapable of believing that it’s possible to share power.
The Franco-German war over Alsace Lorraine loomed heavy in the German Zeitgeist throughout his childhood — how could the master race with the “best blood” lose to the French? Interestingly, this is exactly the opposite position taken by the French in the Dreyfus Affair.
“German boy, do not forget that you are a German, and little girl, remember that you are to become a German mother.” I’m always fascinated by people who think that men are defined as people and women are defined by their capacity to create more men, but it’s very in-character for Hitler and his Aryan breeding program.
I didn’t realize that his allyship with Japan stemmed from his appreciation for them defeating the Slavic Russians in the Russo-Japanese war. This makes sense; I’d always wondered why Japan got a pass on “Aryanness.” He seems to genuinely admire their military power, and even has suggestions on the ways Germany can learn from them.
Unfortunately for everyone, Hitler has a lot of opinions on sex. Not only is he against miscegenation, he thinks the sexual vices of parents are passed onto their children — homosexuality, weakness, and race-mixing. He is incredibly concerned with syphilis, which he thinks is the inevitable result of sex work, and adamant that it can be eradicated by banning “Jewish Art Bolshevism.” This is probably the silliest part of this book, but also the one with the deepest racialized consequences.
Hitler DOES NOT condone premarital sex! The sins of the father will destroy “the civilized race.” The mother is immaterial and should only be submissive.
He treats culture as biological fact and not social collaboration; all culture is created by Aryans, the rest is framed as imitation — incredibly interesting coming from a Christian supercessionist who hates Jews.
It’s worth noting, for all that Hitler rails against “the Jews and the Marxists,” he’s very obviously drawing on the Protocols, which say that Jews invented Marxism to weaken society and sow division among peoples. This is important to know, because non-Jewish Communists love claiming that the foundation of Naziism was opposition to Marxism, and antisemitism was secondary. Hitler does indeed oppose Marxism, but, like with all other evils of the world, he believes it’s a Jewish plot to undermine the Aryan race and its culture. His strategy to destroy Marxism is to eradicate the Jews. His strategy to destroy homosexuality and trans people, is to eradicate the Jews. He believes that with the Jews gone, no one will be born with disabilities, which are the result of race-mixing, which is caused by the Jews. This is why, when the Nazis were losing the war and the Russian front was on their doorstep, they put even more effort into killing the Jews rather than effectively fighting back against the Russians; as far as they were concerned, the Russians would be defeated by killing the Jews. If you had any problem, they had a Final Solution.
When he was first introduced to Marxism, his primary objection was the idea that a German could call a Slav “comrade.” Incredibly funny considering Hajj Amin Al-Husseini’s efforts to gather Bosnian Muslims to the German war effort in the 1940s.
It is understandable to be annoyed by Marxist jargon; I think most people have been annoyed by Marxist jargon, though I can’t say it’s ever made me ask if Marxists were “humans, worthy of belonging to a great nation.” He goes on to say that if German Marxists are human, then it’s meaningless to be a German, and if they’re not human, then it’s very sad how few humans there are in Germany. Standard Nazi dehumanization.
His second objection to Marxists is that they praise weakness; this is all framed in a very Social Darwinist way.
On page 44, he insists on “combatting poison gas [Marxism] with poison gas.” This is actually a theme throughout the book; because Hitler was hospitalized in an Allied poison gas attack in WWI, he has an absolute fixation on destroying his enemies with it.
“Marxism, whose goal is and remains the destruction of all non-Jewish national states…” This one is really interesting, because it combines anti-Marxism, antisemitism, and anti-Zionism in the same way that Egypt would when justifying the 1948 war. Considering the alliance between the Egyptians and the Nazis, and the amnesty offered to Nazi collaborators in post-war Egypt, it doesn’t surprise me at all that some of them transitioned from Nazi propaganda in 1945 to anti-Zionist propaganda in 1948. Speaking of:
I was shocked that he actually opens his very first “the Jews control the world” rant not with racialized antisemitism, but with explicit anti-Zionism. In my mind, the progression of Jew-hate throughout history went anti-Judaism -> antisemitism -> anti-Zionism; that Adolf Hitler, in his famously genocidal antisemitic manifesto, describes himself as an anti-Zionist before an antisemite really surprised and unsettled me.
“This apparent struggle between Zionistic and liberal Jews disgusted me; for it was false through and through, founded on lies and scarcely in keeping with the moral elevation and purity always claimed by this people.” There is nothing new under the sun.
He claims Jews were “colonizing” Germany. Where in the world are Jews allowed to live without being colonizers? Why is it that Jewish “colonization” always leads to attempted Jewish eradication?
He believes that Jews have a fake culture, which they’ve stolen from superior, authentic cultures. I swear I’ve heard this one before.
Zionism, to him, proves that Jews are a unique non-German nation destroying the sanctity of Germanness.
The Pan-German nationalism (of the Anschluss) that he espouses strongly mirrors the Pan-Arab nationalism that was arising at the same time. This isn’t in Mein Kampf, but in letters between Hitler and Al-Husseini, Hitler makes the case that the Palestinians could not be Semites, and must have had Aryan blood, because they were too civilized. The ties between the two philosophies are incredibly clear, and it makes sense, knowing this, that the Arab world would attempt a Final Solution for its own Jews in the following decades.
His understanding of sacrifice and struggle uncomfortably mirrors modern jihadist philosophies — actually, I really want to know, in the Arabic translation, does the translator substitute jihad for Kampf? He uses the word struggle a lot; is it framed in terms of religious jihad? Update: I did a quick google search and it looks like it can either be translated as Kifahi or Jihadi; the former seems to be the more standard translation, but the latter was allegedly used by the Muslim Brotherhood. Again, this makes sense considering their post-war Egyptian origins; Husseini was welcomed back from Berlin as a hero, and I believe he met Arafat and the Muslim Brotherhood around the same time.
Unfortunately, I understand why this is an Arabic-language bestseller. There’s an obsession with the decline in cultural and national power around WWI, and rather than grappling with the deep social and political issues that led to that decline, it places all responsibility on the Jews. Hitler’s “tradition versus modernity” religious-war framing fits so neatly into Salafist Jihad.
Chapter one is mostly devoted to Hitler’s idyllic Bavarian childhood, and chapter two to his passion for painting and architecture. I often heard that Hitler was kicked out of art school, but by his own admission, he was never even accepted in.
One chapter opens: “As a young scamp in my wild years,” and I actually laughed out loud. Hitler’s “wild years” of the 1890s. The Führer of the Third Reich was a “young scamp.”
Hitler believes that International Jewish world finance is trying to destroy Germany, and they’re so strong that he compares them to the German folk character Siegfried, who has sharp, scaly, invulnerable skin, like a dragon’s. Unfortunately, the translator renders him as “Horny Siegfried.” Several chapters later, allusions are made to Horny Siegfried “sowing his wild oats,” i.e. spreading syphilis. I’m a little obsessed with Horny Siegfried now.
Hitler thinks he was born in the wrong generation. He “should have been born at the time of the Wars of Liberation.”
When Franz Ferdinand is assassinated, Hitler falls to his knees and thanks heaven for the “good fortune” of getting to fight in WWI.
He thinks Esperanto is a Jewish plot to trick people of different races into talking to each other.
An entire chapter is devoted to flag design.
I read all 700 pages of this, but the last 400 are pretty redundant and mostly devoted to the political structure of the Nazi party, which can be summed up as “Hitler thinks all party decisions should be made by one supreme leader and that leader should be him,” so I stopped taking notes about halfway through.
While this wasn’t well-written, it was infinitely more readable than the Protocols, which is a small consolation. If I had to read any more “WE ARE EVIL! WE WANT VENGEANCE! WE HATE ALL GOOD THINGS! WE WILL DESTROY LIBERTY!” I was going to lose my mind.
The main thing that stands out to me about his writing style is that it’s completely disorganized. The overall structure of the book is autobiographical, with random attempts at social and political philosophy scattered throughout. His ideas weren’t very deep or well-formed, but I think his strength is that he appealed emotionally to a deep shame, fear, and insecurity running throughout a post-war German society that couldn’t reconcile the race science of the day with losing to “inferior” nations. I’m reminded of modern conspiracy theorists; in a world where so much is out of your control, and growing increasingly out of your control, I think it’s tempting to try and make sense of everything in simple terms by saying “the world is inherently good and the Jews, our eternal enemies, are manipulating the natural order behind the scenes to ruin it for us.”
His writing is much more childish and emotive than I was expecting. There’s passion and rage, of course, but there’s also a fair amount of waxing poetic about the countryside, inward contentment, and idyllic bliss. The tone shifts constantly, but it’s entirely too personal to read like a political manifesto; it’s more like a disjointed novel, or a journal (which makes sense considering he wrote the whole thing in the few months he was in prison).
He’s so melodramatic. There’s a lot of falling to his knees, weeping, heart swelling, etc. It’s the language of a soap opera in the theatre of a dictatorship.
As a rule, authoritarians have a cynical and bleak outlook on the people around them. Their failure to imagine others’ interiority creates a dull and miserable world. On that note, there are deep themes of paranoia around rot, filth, contamination, and decay. It reads like a desperate, obsessive attempt to remake the world in his image or die trying. The German world of the 1920s is not worth living in, but the potential Aryan ethnostate of the future is something — the only thing — worth dying for.
It was absolutely chilling to get a depiction of 1920s Vienna from the man who killed or expelled all my family there. Reading Hitler’s account of the social ills of Viennese Jewry felt a bit like being hunted.
