Sunday, December 12, 2021

Its author is a self-educated man of very limited intelligence

Reading Literarily Hitler, a book review of someone's new treatment of Mein Kampf.  The book review is by Paul O’Mahoney and he references one of the briefest and more stringent critiques of Mein Kampf, a review by Daniel Binchy in 1933.

[Mein Kampf] certainly has given more ammunition to Hitler’s enemies than to his friends, and any unprejudiced outsider who has the patience to finish the work is bound to conclude that its author is a self-educated man of very limited intelligence. Written in a maddeningly wooden style, in which hackneyed clichés alternate with windy rhetoric, full of rambling digressions and hysterical denunciations, it affords no insight whatever into Hitler’s own life and development. Anything he tells us about himself is merely introduced, as a peg on which to hang some political or ethnological dissertation. Commonplaces of history, politics and sociology are paraded as new and epoch-making discoveries; long-discarded theories are rescued from the lumber rooms of science and enunciated with all the pompous omniscience of a village schoolmaster. At times one is almost disarmed by the author’s naiveté; occasionally, too, one meets a gem of entirely unconscious humour. But for the most part the book makes sad reading, and anyone who has even attempted the task will readily understand why Hitler exalts the spoken over the written word.

 

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