Scott McLemee: Hitler — the Classic?
It is disagreeable to approach the cashier with a book called How to Read Hitler. One way to take the stink off would be to purchase one or two other volumes in the new How to Read series published by W. W. Norton, which also includes short guides to Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein. But at the time, standing in line at a neighborhood bookstore a couple weeks ago, I wasn’t aware of those other titles. (The only thing mitigating the embarrassment was knowing that my days as a skinhead, albeit a non-Nazi one, are long over.) And anyway, the appearance of Adolf Hitler in such distinguished literary and philosophical company raises more troubling questions than it resolves.
“Intent on letting the reader experience the pleasures and intellectual stimulation in reading classic authors,” according to the back cover, “the How to Read series will facilitate and enrich your understanding of texts vital to the canon.” The series editor is Simon Critchley, a professor of philosophy at the New School in New York City, who looms ever larger as the guy capable of defending poststructuralist thought from its naysayers. Furthermore, he’s sharp and lucid about it, in ways that might just persuade those naysayers to read Derrida before denouncing him. (Yeah, that’ll happen.)
Somehow it is not that difficult to imagine members of the National Association of Scholars waving around the How to Read paperbacks during Congressional hearings, wildly indignant at Critchley’s implicit equation of Shakespeare and Hitler as “classic authors” who are “vital to the canon.”
False alarm! Sure, the appearance of the Fuhrer alongside the Bard is a bit of a provocation. But Neil Gregor, the author of How to Read Hitler, is a professor of modern German history at the University of Southampton, and under no illusions about the Fuhrer’s originality as a thinker or competence as a writer.
About Mein Kampf, Gregor notes that there is “an unmistakably ’stream of consciousness’ quality to the writing, which does not appear to have undergone even the most basic editing, let alone anything like polishing.” Although Gregor does not mention it, the title Hitler originally gave to the book reveals his weakness for the turgid and the pompous: Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. (The much snappier My Struggle was his publisher’s suggestion.)
Incompetent writers make history, too. And learning to read them is not that easy. The fact that Hitler had ideas, rather than just obsessions, is disobliging to consider. Many of the themes and images in his writing reflect an immersion in the fringe literature of his day — the large body of ephemeral material analyzed in Fritz Stern in his classic study The Politics of Cultural Despair: The Rise of the Germanic Ideology.
But Gregor for the most part ignores this influence on Hitler. He emphasizes, instead, the elements of Hitler’s thinking that were, in their day, utterly mainstream. He could quote whole paragraphs Carl de Clausewitz on strategy. And his racist world view drew out the most virulent consequences of the theories of Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.(While Hitler was dictating his memoirs in a prison following the Beer Hall Putsch, he could point with admiration to one effort to translate their doctrines into policy: The immigration restrictions imposed in the United States in the 1920s.)
Gregor’s method is to select passages from Mein Kampf and from an untitled sequel, published posthumously as Hitler’s Second Book. He then carefully unpacks them — showing what else is going on within the text, beneath the level of readily paraphrasable content. With his political autobiography, Hitler was not just recycling the standard complaints of the extreme right, or indulging in Wagnerian arias of soapbox oratory. He was also competing with exponents of similar nationalist ideas. He wrote in order to establish himself as the (literally) commanding figure in the movement.
So there is an implicit dialogue going on, disguised as a rather bombastic monologue. “Long passages of Hitler’s writings,” as Gregor puts it, “take the form of an extended critique of the political decisions of the late nineteenth century.... Hitler reveals himself not only as a nationalist politician and racist thinker, but — this is a central characteristic of fascist ideology — as offering a vision of revitalization and rebirth following the perceived decay of the liberal era, whose failings he intends to overcome.”...
Read entire article at Inside Higher Education
“Intent on letting the reader experience the pleasures and intellectual stimulation in reading classic authors,” according to the back cover, “the How to Read series will facilitate and enrich your understanding of texts vital to the canon.” The series editor is Simon Critchley, a professor of philosophy at the New School in New York City, who looms ever larger as the guy capable of defending poststructuralist thought from its naysayers. Furthermore, he’s sharp and lucid about it, in ways that might just persuade those naysayers to read Derrida before denouncing him. (Yeah, that’ll happen.)
Somehow it is not that difficult to imagine members of the National Association of Scholars waving around the How to Read paperbacks during Congressional hearings, wildly indignant at Critchley’s implicit equation of Shakespeare and Hitler as “classic authors” who are “vital to the canon.”
False alarm! Sure, the appearance of the Fuhrer alongside the Bard is a bit of a provocation. But Neil Gregor, the author of How to Read Hitler, is a professor of modern German history at the University of Southampton, and under no illusions about the Fuhrer’s originality as a thinker or competence as a writer.
About Mein Kampf, Gregor notes that there is “an unmistakably ’stream of consciousness’ quality to the writing, which does not appear to have undergone even the most basic editing, let alone anything like polishing.” Although Gregor does not mention it, the title Hitler originally gave to the book reveals his weakness for the turgid and the pompous: Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. (The much snappier My Struggle was his publisher’s suggestion.)
Incompetent writers make history, too. And learning to read them is not that easy. The fact that Hitler had ideas, rather than just obsessions, is disobliging to consider. Many of the themes and images in his writing reflect an immersion in the fringe literature of his day — the large body of ephemeral material analyzed in Fritz Stern in his classic study The Politics of Cultural Despair: The Rise of the Germanic Ideology.
But Gregor for the most part ignores this influence on Hitler. He emphasizes, instead, the elements of Hitler’s thinking that were, in their day, utterly mainstream. He could quote whole paragraphs Carl de Clausewitz on strategy. And his racist world view drew out the most virulent consequences of the theories of Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.(While Hitler was dictating his memoirs in a prison following the Beer Hall Putsch, he could point with admiration to one effort to translate their doctrines into policy: The immigration restrictions imposed in the United States in the 1920s.)
Gregor’s method is to select passages from Mein Kampf and from an untitled sequel, published posthumously as Hitler’s Second Book. He then carefully unpacks them — showing what else is going on within the text, beneath the level of readily paraphrasable content. With his political autobiography, Hitler was not just recycling the standard complaints of the extreme right, or indulging in Wagnerian arias of soapbox oratory. He was also competing with exponents of similar nationalist ideas. He wrote in order to establish himself as the (literally) commanding figure in the movement.
So there is an implicit dialogue going on, disguised as a rather bombastic monologue. “Long passages of Hitler’s writings,” as Gregor puts it, “take the form of an extended critique of the political decisions of the late nineteenth century.... Hitler reveals himself not only as a nationalist politician and racist thinker, but — this is a central characteristic of fascist ideology — as offering a vision of revitalization and rebirth following the perceived decay of the liberal era, whose failings he intends to overcome.”...