I think I read somewhere (maybe on this board?) that Hitler’s main problem was his lack of skill at painting figures.
All he really wanted was a little peace.
“A little piece of Poland, a little piece of France…”
Well, if Hitler didn’t exist, it would have been necessary to invent him!
“I lieben you! I lieben you, Baby! Now, lieb me alone.”
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.
ralph124c wrote
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
Not only in Germany, it is also a banned book in the Netherlands. (which I think is quite silly).
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