4 ms·
I 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
by madaxe_again 11y ago
I 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.