On Hitler's Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism (Untimely Meditations) - Softcover

Koschorke, Albrecht

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262533332 ISBN 13: 9780262533331

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2017

Synopsis

An examination of the narrative strategies employed in the most dangerous book of the twentieth century and a reflection on totalitarian literature.

Hitler's Mein Kampf was banned in Germany for almost seventy years, kept from being reprinted by the accidental copyright holder, the Bavarian Ministry of Finance. In December 2015, the first German edition of Mein Kampf since 1946 appeared, with Hitler's text surrounded by scholarly commentary apparently meant to act as a kind of cordon sanitaire. And yet the dominant critical assessment (in Germany and elsewhere) of the most dangerous book of the twentieth century is that it is boring, unoriginal, jargon-laden, badly written, embarrassingly rabid, and altogether ludicrous. (Even in the 1920s, the consensus was that the author of such a book had no future in politics.) How did the unreadable Mein Kampf manage to become so historically significant? In this book, German literary scholar Albrecht Koschorke attempts to explain the power of Hitler's book by examining its narrative strategies.

Koschorke argues that Mein Kampf cannot be reduced to an ideological message directed to all readers. By examining the text and the signals that it sends, he shows that we can discover for whom Hitler strikes his propagandistic poses and who is excluded. Koschorke parses the borrowings from the right-wing press, the autobiographical details concocted to make political points, the attack on the Social Democrats that bleeds into an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, the contempt for science, and the conscious attempt to trigger outrage.

A close reading of National Socialism's definitive text, Koschorke concludes, can shed light on the dynamics of fanaticism. This lesson of Mein Kampf still needs to be learned.

About this title

About the Author:

Albrecht Koschorke is Professor of German Literature and Literary Studies at the University of Konstanz. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago from 2004 to 2009.

Review:

Koschorke shows the contemporality of Hitler's fanatic strategy to gain power. His creative reading of Mein Kampf can help us to understand how political bodies are damaged by ideas, which are invented only to perpetuate this damage. Such an interpretation is needed in times like ours.

―Peter Trawny, Professor, Martin Heidegger Institute; author of Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

About this edition

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0262533332
• ISBN 13: 9780262533331
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88