Mein Kampf: A Review

Part 1? God help me.

I’ve been quiet for five days, but I have not been on holiday and I have not had a restful break. At first I was researching this post, and then I was trying to write it. My efforts on the latter front have not gone well, so I’m throwing caution to the wind and pounding this out blind from a stack of notes, without a plan and with no idea where it’s going or where it will end up.

There’s a backstory here: For over a year I’ve thought it might prove worthwhile to review tabu books. I don’t mean those overexposed high-school tomes that find themselves for unaccountable reasons on the Forbidden Books shelves of major bookstore chains, but rather books that are genuinely tabu in our society. These are books you can’t get caught reading on the train, or books that got their authors in a lot of trouble, or books that are otherwise considered fundamentally indecent and evil and beyond all bounds of acceptable discourse. They are books that many of the most open-minded people would say deserve their tabu, but they are also books we are all undeniably curious about. In Germany, one book tops this list and outstrips all the others so completely that it’s hardly credible to begin any blog series on tabu books without an inaugural post on this singular and most tabu book of all.

I speak of a book that has been translated into at least 17 different languages and that in its time sold an astounding 12,450,000 copies across an even more astounding 1,122 print runs. At one point a copy of this book could be found in basically every German household. It is a long and dense book, comprising over 230,000 words split across two volumes, and despite its wide distribution we may doubt that very many people actually read it. It’s a book that Joseph Goebbels in the confines of his private diary called “honest and courageous,” but also “stylistically unbearable” and “unpolished,” concluding that “you have to be very open-minded to appreciate it.”

I’m talking, of course, about Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. And if ever there were a time to draw the paywall curtain, God knows that time is now. In what follows I’m going to pour out my thoughts on Mein Kampf as they’ve grown over the past weeks, and if you want to read more I invite you to subscribe. Without your support nothing I do here would be possible.