Our next assigned class reading was Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. Since this book is so large and we only had so much time to read it, our professor divided it out into different chapters. I was assigned to read the introduction and chapters six through ten. I took a few days to get through the chapters, but I was able to get it done compared to 120 Days Of Sodom. That one I could not get through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This introduction was probably the best one I have ever seen. I have never seen such a thorough outline of the history of a text. I would say usually introductions are a couple pages explaining a little bit of the translators opinions and a background of the text. But this however did so much more! We got a detailed backstory of Hitler’s childhood, and I honestly learned a lot of Hitler through this section. Like for one I had never known that his grandfather was possibly Jewish. Another thing I had not known about Hitler was that he was homeless for some time in the summer of 1909. The introduction also gives us a history of people Adolf had learned from, like Dr. P\u00f6tsch, who is apparently credited for inspiring young hitler with the views of extreme german nationalism (as stated on page xvi.) In his later life when attempting to register for the military, he was later pronounced physically unfit for military service. All of these are things that I had never had any knowledge about until reading the introduction and these were just a few points out of the others that I had decided to include. Even if you dont want to read the entirety of Mein Kampf<\/em>, I would definitely recommended just skimming through the introduction to learn more about Hitler. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Obviously the normal thing is to start off on chapter 1 in a book and go from there, but I wasn’t much interested in reading all 500+ pages of this text. It just felt like too much for me and not interesting enough for me to stay focused. Even in just the few pages I had to read that were assigned, I had trouble focusing on some parts. I’m not sure if it was because of the translation or something else, but it just felt like Hitler tried to speak or write in such a scholarly way. I feel like there were so many sentences that he went on and on about that he could’ve easily just done 1 to 2 sentences of an explanation. I did however learn a lot of new vocabulary from this text, like axiom, which according to Google is a statement that is regarded as true. Never once had I heard that word but I guess there’s a first for everything! In chapter six tited “War Propagand<\/em>a,” I believe we really get an insight of where he begins to get his political exposure. He talks a lot about propaganda activity and explains pretty much what propaganda is to him. On page 164, he talks about how all propaganda must be popular and the intellectual level must be adjusted to the limited intelligence of those it is addressed to. Basically saying that the less intelligent someone is, the more you have to dumb it down. He says the aim of propaganda is to “influence a whole of people” and that the purpose is to convice the average person. On page 169, Hitler states that the masses (average people) are slow-moving and they require a certain amount of time before they notice a thing, so the simplest of ideas must be repeated thousands of times before the masses will remember them. In my opinion, I don’t see how Hitler wouldn’t be seen as a mass since he’s pretty much an average citizen besides being in the military. At this point in the book, he has yet to enter politics, so what would make him higher than a mass? One thing I notice about this text is how he’s repeatedly talking about Psychology. He really seems to psychoanalyze everything, even just ideas about the German propaganda. At this point, he’s giving off this narcissitic persona, thinking that he’s higher up than the average person and that everyone is a lot more stupid than he is. It’s just very odd. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In chapter seven, he starts off the chapter by psychoanalyzing the army’s decision to counteract. He again just really thinks so highly of himself. He seems to think he knows much better than the leaders of the army and political figures. On page 171, he talks about what is happening in his homeland. He talks about the rage he was filled with when he saw the “psychological mass murder” that was being committed. I’m honestly not sure what he means by this but again, he’s talking about psychology. Hitler then talks about “internal affairs”, how the same man that complained still silently went on to do his work and so on. I think what he means by this is that even though is felt like everything was falling apart, even in the homeland, they still fought for their country, even if it felt like ther was no point. On October 7th, 1916, he was wounded in Battle. He was brought back to Germany, where he could barely even recognize his homefront. This is where he starts to notice the “takeover of Jews.” On page 175, he says everywhere he looks there’s a Jew. Every clerk was a Jew and the offices were filled with Jews. Now what I see is jobs being filled, but I assume what Hitler sees is the “Jewish propaganda” to takeover. He uses the saying “the spider was slowly sucking the blood out of the people’s pores.” He says that during the war, Jews had found an instrument and little by little ” finished off the national free economy.” I genuinely don’t understand why he sees this as a “takeover” but I’m sure it somehow makes sense to him. He again says on page 176 that he sees the “craftiest trick of the Jew,” to distract the general attention from himself and to organize the revolution. Towards the end of chapter seven, he says on November 10th, he learns everything and that everything being that Germany became a republic. He seems geniunely so distraught by this, and maybe because he’s so politically opinionated, it almost seems like the end of the world for him. He talks about how fighting in the war felt like it was for nothing now and that millions had lost their lives for nothing. While this is partially true, it almost seems selfish for him to feel so betrayed, since he was still alive. At the end of the chapter, he then states that he decides to go into politics. My feeling is that this is really where the book begins and where things are really going to take. We will see in my next post how I feel about things and where they go to. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our next assigned class reading was Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. Since this book is so large and we only had so much time to read it, our professor divided it out into different chapters. I was assigned to read the introduction and chapters six through ten. I took a few days to get through…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fsem-readings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forbiddentexts.victoriahunsaker.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forbiddentexts.victoriahunsaker.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forbiddentexts.victoriahunsaker.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forbiddentexts.victoriahunsaker.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forbiddentexts.victoriahunsaker.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/forbiddentexts.victoriahunsaker.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"https:\/\/forbiddentexts.victoriahunsaker.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forbiddentexts.victoriahunsaker.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forbiddentexts.victoriahunsaker.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forbiddentexts.victoriahunsaker.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}