# Anybody read Mein Kampf?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-read-mein-kampf/301854
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [April 30, 2005, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-read-mein-kampf/301854 "2005-04-30T12:16:53Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 3
### Author:  [@WolfpackJeep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WolfpackJeep)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2005, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-read-mein-kampf/301854/41 "2005-05-01T16:33:18Z")
> [@Walloon](#):
>
> I’ve seen at least [four of his watercolor paintings](http://www.usmbooks.com/hitler_paintings.html). Not bad.
I think I read somewhere (maybe on this board?) that Hitler’s main problem was his lack of skill at painting figures.
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### Author:  [@AncientHumanoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AncientHumanoid)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2005, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-read-mein-kampf/301854/42 "2005-05-01T16:42:56Z")
All he really wanted was a little peace.
“A little piece of Poland, a little piece of France…”
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### Author:  [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2005, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-read-mein-kampf/301854/43 "2005-05-01T19:42:23Z")
> [@NoClueBoy](#):
>
> For some absurd reason, I find myself close to giggles thinking about Voltaire having read Hitler.
>
> (not a commentary about the user, just the name)
Well, if Hitler didn’t exist, it would have been necessary to invent him!
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### Author:  [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2005, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-read-mein-kampf/301854/44 "2005-05-01T19:44:09Z")
> [@NoClueBoy](#):
>
> All he really wanted was a little peace.
> “A little piece of Poland, a little piece of France…”
“I lieben you! I lieben you, Baby! Now, lieb me alone.”
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### Author:  [@Cicero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cicero)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2005, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-read-mein-kampf/301854/45 "2005-05-01T20:05:49Z")
I read it some 30 years ago, and like others, I found it very tedious.
One point, there is a documentary on the History Channel, that suggests it wasn’t actually written by Hitler. Rather it was ghosted for him by one of his later diplomats. His name escapes me now.
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### Author:  [@Bill\_H](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bill_H)
#### Post date: [May 2, 2005, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-read-mein-kampf/301854/46 "2005-05-02T18:41:35Z")
**ralph124c** wrote
> [@](#):
>
> Do any of Hitler’s paintings survive?
I almost bought one once. My wife (who is jewish, and who’s mother and grandmother were in Germany during this whole mess) didn’t feel that was a very good idea.
It was a nice picture. Nothing amazing, but better than I could paint.
I also almost bought a painting by Winston Churchill. In my non-expert opinion, he wasn’t as good a painter as Hitler, but fortunately he was a better soldier.
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### Author:  [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 2:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-read-mein-kampf/301854/47 "2005-05-03T02:07:55Z")
Hitler was by all accounts an amazingly effective public speaker – he built his career on it. I saw _Triumph of the Will_ and, going by the English subtitles, I’d say he was pretty good at it. Not rambling at all. (Rather vague, IMO, but that might be because I’m fuzzy on the social context within which he was speaking.) And I’m pretty sure he never used a speechwriter (his ego would never have allowed that!). In view of his obvious talent at speechifying, I wonder why he was such a poor writer.
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### Author:  [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-read-mein-kampf/301854/48 "2005-05-03T02:11:55Z")
> [@ouryL](#):
>
> Did you know there is a sequel?
Yes, a friend of mine has a copy. [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1929631162/qid=1115086562/sr=8-3/ref=pd\_csp\_3/002-7706166-9317606?v=glance&s=books&n=507846](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1929631162/qid=1115086562/sr=8-3/ref=pd_csp_3/002-7706166-9317606?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) But, as the translator’s preface explains, it was never published during Hitler’s lifetime – by the time he finished it he had attained power and had no further need of books to make his case.
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### Author:  [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 6:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-read-mein-kampf/301854/49 "2005-05-03T06:02:32Z")
> [@Malodorous](#):
>
> I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard part of the reason that _Mein Kampf_ and other German texts have a reputation as being horribly written is that German, due to having three genders for thier nouns, are able to keep track of three different pronouns in their sentences. When translated into a language without gendered nouns (English) this makes the sentences seem meandering and unclear. Of course Hitler was not particularaly educated, so its far from unlikely that he wasn’t the best example of German writing available.
Hmm. Lots of languages (most?) outside of English have multiple genders. And Goethe can be translated to be pretty moving despite the feminine/masculine/neuter divide. If I were stereotyping German syntax, from what little I know of it, I’d say a bigger problem is in the love of compound nouns and verbs, and the often “backwards” (i.e., reversed subject and verb – vis a vis English) structure, which – if poorly translated – lead to some mouth-filling and awkward sentences (just a little example of the German passion for looooonnng constructions: one of the leading German press agencies into the current day was given the euphonious name of Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Offentlich Rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland – mercifully, “ARD” for short).
The preface I read to Mein Kampf identified some themes in Hitler’s writing that make it even less well-aged than lots of 80 year old political theorizing. As the above post notes, he was not terribly extensively educated (not ignorant, more of an auto-didact). According to the commentator I read, Hitler was also heavily (and not helpfully) influenced by a couple of bourgeois Austrian passions of his day – love of popular operas, with their melodramatic and bombastic romantic storylines, and a very striving-middle-class interest in (if not real capacity for) accessible theories of philosophy, political science, and other popularized forms of “Kultur.”
Lots of the text itself is impossible to judge outside the context of its era and without sharing the particularist viewpoints of its author – Hitler dwells at length on the errors of his adversaries and predecessors, in many cases sniping over partisan political feuds of the moment and the recent past that are as foreign to us as most of yesterday’s breathless entries by Drudge or Wonkette would be to a casual reader of 2085. To the extent that he spends large amounts of time dwelling on things that no one cares about today, he seems a tedious crank. But it’s not surprising that some of those themes were, if not persuasive, at least not totally irrelevant and nutty, to the Germans who had lived through that era.
Political memoirs or screeds rarely age well (though few are as tedious or repetitive as Hitler’s – then again, Bob Dole and Bill Bradley didn’t have years of prison time on their hands to spill out their venom at length, and the virtue of self-publishing is that editing is largely non-existent).
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### Author:  [@Scoundrel\_Swanswater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scoundrel_Swanswater)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-read-mein-kampf/301854/50 "2005-05-03T14:40:17Z")
> [@Zsofia](#):
>
> I hear you can’t buy it in Germany, though; in college my Holocaust class professor tried to get German copies in modern typeface for the Language Across the Curriculum students (you get an extra hour of credit for doing some of the work in a foreign language - I did it wiht Latin in a class on myth) and found that it was impossible to get.
Not only in Germany, it is also a banned book in the Netherlands. (which I think is quite silly).
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### Author:  [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2005, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/anybody-read-mein-kampf/301854/51 "2005-05-03T20:24:57Z")
> [@Malodorous](#):
>
> I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard part of the reason that Mein Kampf and other German texts have a reputation as being horribly written is that German, due to having three genders for thier nouns, are able to keep track of three different pronouns in their sentences. When translated into a language without gendered nouns (English) this makes the sentences seem meandering and unclear.
I actually read parts of it in German. It doesn’t help very much.
**BrainGlutton** mentions Hitler’s success as a public speaker. Definitely true, but the book reads a lot like one of his speeches - extremely long, not very well organized, and basically a three-hour riff on themes that, to modern sensibilities, are either incomprehensible or offensive. Maybe the book would sound better if read out loud, in the context of some brilliantly organized Party rally, with torches and snappy, shining uniforms, and offering an escape and a scapegoat for the desperate poverty of a society and a _Volk_. And Hitler had street cred back then too - he was a genuine, decorated war hero.
But I suspect **Huerta88** ’s analysis is correct - practically everything on which Hitler based his political philosophy has been rejected by civilized people. And therefore his rants don’t resonate. Thank God.
I wonder how it would have read if Hitler had died before invading Poland, or even (God forbid) won WWII.
Regards,
Shodan
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