Book review: Literarily Hitler.
Mein Kampf is a river of invective utterly bereft of nuance or grace. Apart from its tawdry contents, the rabid tone of the book will inevitably repel finer or more reasonable minds. The disdain for accuracy or nuance, however, is a clue to the book’s power. First of all, it allows Hitler to occupy the terrain of his opponents, the Social Democrats, without the need accurately to present their activities or record as a party, and to denounce populist, Marxist-inspired workers’ movements and trade unions while promoting his political vision as a form of socialism. Any reader who carries with them to Mein Kampf a vague notion of historical Marxism as the chief bogeyman of the bourgeoisie and repository of the hopes of workers will be surprised at Hitler’s sponsoring the cause of workers and heaping scorn on “the bourgeois parties” in the same breath as denouncing Marxism (for the essence of its message, as well as for being an alleged Jewish conspiracy). The Jewish conspiracy, Koschorke claims, was the crucial supplement by which Hitler radicalised his own position to distinguish it from the ideas of those whose clothes he had stolen: “Mein Kampf is constructed in such a way that confrontation with the Social Democrats and discussion of the ‘Jewish question’ relate to each other as problem and solution.”
On Hitler’s Mein Kampf: The Poetics of
National Socialism - by Albrecht Koschorke
Reviewed by Paul O’Mahoney
The extreme brevity of
this essay perhaps reflects its author’s sensitivity to the difficulty of
saying anything at length which is both new and worthwhile about Mein
Kampf, its author, the regime over which he presided or the global
conflagration that regime provoked. Still more difficult, perhaps, is to say
anything new and interesting which is not of merely historical but also moral
import – which imparts some grander lesson about peoples or political
demagoguery, never mind the nature of history or humankind.
It cannot be said that
up to the present time the appropriate lessons have not been learned from the
disastrous Nazi experiment, especially among the people which birthed and which
paid for its outrages: Germany’s longstanding effort and policy of Vergangenheitsbewältigung –
of openly reckoning with, acknowledging and not shying away from the disgrace
of perpetrating a war which it should not have expected to survive as a viable
political entity – remains central to the German national consciousness; and no
subsequent political or diplomatic action of global consequence has entirely
escaped the shadow cast by the Second World War.
To draw general moral
lessons from the Nazis, meanwhile, seems now almost superfluous; and to derive
specific moral lessons applicable to a concrete situation would imply some
situation plausibly comparable to the rise or flourishing of the Third Reich.
Here, instances of misapplied comparison are legion, giving rise to “Godwin’s
Law”, the law of online interactions which states that the longer a thread or
discussion goes on in any online forum, the greater the likelihood that Hitler
or the Nazis will be invoked; or as Godwin phrased it: “as a discussion grows,
the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1”. Partly in light
of the reliability of Godwin’s law, it is difficult to identify a political
situation in advanced Western democracies which would so approximate the rise
of Nazism as to warrant some non-hyperbolic comparison. “You are literally
Hitler” is the tongue-in-cheek formula which parodies and disparages the
merchant of outrage.
And yet, it is hardly
conceivable that one could approach the subject of Hitler in theory or art
hoping entirely to avoid drawing conclusions or shaping fictional exemplars of
continued moral or political relevance. To succeed in providing such is still
possible: Timur Vermes’s novel Er ist Wieder Da (Look Who’s
Back), and even more so its marvellous realisation in David Wnendt’s 2015 film
(complete with unscripted “walkaround” footage), manages thoroughly to
discomfit as its comic action yields gradually to an absorbing darkness.
Koschorke, a literary critic based at the University of Konstanz, submits here
that understanding the confluence of circumstances that legitimated national
socialism in Germany is “more urgent in our own times of mounting
radicalization”.
He accepts that the dissemination of Mein Kampf played
an important role in the rise of Nazism (despite its dreadful prose and its
author’s evident preference for spoken performance), and examines not only its
literary and rhetorical techniques but also the specific conditions under which
the ideas it contains could, even though commonly dismissed as shop-worn and
scarcely coherent, or while outraging many (or few, considering the relative
paucity of readers), meet with success... read more:
http://www.drb.ie/essays/literarily-hitler