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A Historian Who Fled the Nazis and Still Wants Us to Read Hitler
- madaxe_again 11y agoI read Mein Kampf a few times as a kid. It's worthwhile - I ended up seeing hitler as a tragic, broken figure, tormented by his demons, skewed by his misplaced rage at the Weimar Republic, which lead to a path of destruction for millions. Until you understand that anyone can be Hitler, you don't understand.
- afarrell 11y agoI started reading Mein Kampf in 8th grade, but I just found the speaker so whiney and irritating that I lost patience before WWI. I should perhaps go back to it sometime.
- JetSpiegel 11y agoCan't be worse that The Catcher in Rye... Can it?
- sitkack 11y agoMein Kampf mit Jugendlich Alters Angst
- ChristianBundy 11y agoTranslated: "My battle with Teen Angst"
- zo1 11y agoSorry, down-voted you by accident.
- Bluestrike2 11y agoHeh. Pretty good title for it.
- jqm 11y agoI think that's a fair question.
- madaxe_again 11y agoYeah, that sums it up. Woe is me, it's all someone else's fault. That much was true - wilhelm ii was a flea of a man with ego issues who bought ruin to prussia almost single-handedly. Hitler's narrative was utterly disconnected from reality, but utterly reasonable to him and the millions that followed, as a comfortable illusion is preferable to a miserable reality - to most.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoInterestingly, Mussolini also hated the book.
- rpgmaker 11y agoThat is the main message of Judgement at Nuremberg. I was afraid that it was going to be an American exceptionalism-filled movie but it's actually very good and relatively fair to its subject. As fair as you can be to Nazi Germany architects, anyway.
- kafkaesq 11y agoUntil you understand that anyone can be Hitler, you don't understand. Have you ever listened to his speeches, man? As in like, really listened? Go ahead, try it sometime. Claw your soul and your beating heart out through your very eardrums, he will. His talents in that realm were clearly from another plane. Lots of people (perhaps millions) have wanted to "be" the next Hitler. But in terms of sheer charisma and persuasiveness, they just didn't have the juice.
- rurban 11y agoYes, Hitler was an excellent speaker and a lousy writer. "Mein Kampf" is horrible to read and really needs an annotated version, which is still forbidden to purchase. And the millions of poisonous "Mein Kampf" books, which every couple got when they married are still in thousands of boxes. The new foreign policy book from 1942 looks really interesting to me, foreseeing the US war, as the US industrials were major Hitler backers before the war and just had to back down when Hitler started attacking Great Britain. Also the ally Japan threatening Singapore didn't help winning the war. Would be interesting to see how he thought of holding "his friends", the US out of the war. Even Hitler knew that this would not be winnable in the long end.
- imh 11y ago> In his introduction to the “Second Book,” which was finally published officially in 2003, Weinberg wrote, “Germany and the rest of the world have not yet come close to coming to terms with Hitler as a person, as leader of a great nation, and as a symbol.” After each of the recent mass shootings, I've been wondering more and more about whether we aren't doing anything about it because it's so easy to just label the shooters as evil, as if they aren't people. It's tough to accept that real people, with identities and feelings just like you and me, can do terrible things. Understanding tragedy and history is key to not repeating it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- madaxe_again 11y agoI'll probably maintain for all my days that there is no good or evil, just acts. Yes, cry "moral relativism!", but morals are social constructs, whether you like it or not - there is no universal law of morality, even if your name is Kant. Hitler thought he was good. Those who followed him thought he was good. In the narrative and perceptive reality of nazi Germany he was good. My grandmother waxes lyrical about the wonderful and charismatic Herr Hitler (she's Austrian, was a hitlerjugendherberge), and listening to her makes oh so clear the dreams and glory that hitler successfully sold to the very disillusioned masses. He wasn't evil. He just served a moral code so alien and repulsive to us today that we write it off as "evil". In fact, at the time, his politics were aligned with those of the US, UK, and other allied powers - eugenics, fascism, and antisemitism were rife in all - but it was their expansionist policy which ultimately led to the branding as evil and ww2. Don't get me wrong - I'm no apologist - but I do try to understand events from a contemporaneous and empathic perspective.
- bsder 11y ago> I'll probably maintain for all my days that there is no good or evil, just acts. Yes, cry "moral relativism!", but morals are social constructs, whether you like it or not - there is no universal law of morality, even if your name is Kant. Actually, "do unto others as you would have done unto you" is a pretty damn near universal law of morality. It doesn't encompass things like when to punish bad actors, but it covers a huge range of situations that we encounter every day. However, what most people never recognize is that apathy is the mechanism that allows small evils to persist long enough to turn into great evils. Often even a few individuals standing up at the beginning can thwart a rising tide that will be impossible to resist once it gets going.
- Marcomasino 11y agoNot another Newyorker article, sorry I can't take anymore, Dave, my mind is going, I can feel it .. I can feel it .. my mind is going .. there is no question about it :)
- Marcomasino 11y agoAnd apparently at least one commentator on Hacker News has no sense of humour :) And if they don't agree with you, so rather than respond with a refutation they'll just downvote you instead.