Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)

Mercifully easier to read than the interminable noodling dreck that is Mein Kampf, this book of Hitler's Wartime Conversations (more commonly known as Hitler's Table Talk) is still very heavy-going. Hitler's supposedly magnetic charisma refuses to translate into English on the page, and those history buffs like myself seeking to gain insight into the mind of the individual who started the Second World War will find themselves facing a wall. It's a wall with the occasional crack in it, show more allowing light to shine through in fragments, but a wall nonetheless.

The greatest value of the book is in revising and remedying our view of Hitler. Not rehabilitation, of course, though it's the unfortunate lot of the World War Two buff that you may inadvertently raise a few eyebrows among your peers if you reveal you have committed to reading a full book of Adolf Hitler's conversations. Rather, the revision is welcome because it has become commonplace in our culture to present Adolf Hitler as a sort of cartoon villain, whether that's the unhinged ranter of the Nuremberg rallies and popular culture, the lucky provincial buffoon painted by the propagandists and the commentators, or (a view that has become more common nowadays) the empty vessel into which dupes poured their own hatreds and prejudices and saw them made manifest. Even many otherwise astute historians fall into one of these traps. The obvious alternative – that Hitler was an intelligent politician who acted rationally (by his own lights) in pursuit of a grand design – is one that people are still reluctant to acknowledge.

Hitler's Wartime Conversations reveal an individual far more multifaceted than the cartoonish personification of evil we are often presented with. There's little discussion of the war then being prosecuted (most of the conversations are from 1941-42, with some from 1943-44, almost twenty years after our last direct insight via Mein Kampf), but that makes sense considering these conversations took place in personal moments, not the councils of war. Instead, we get Hitler's opinions – sometimes educated, sometimes trite – on art, architecture, his plans for German colonisation in the East, his memories of his rise to power, and numerous other asides. Much of the content will therefore be predictable for those who already have a basic education on the man (and who, choosing to read this book, wouldn't?), but there are still a few surprises. It's peculiar to read Adolf Hitler of all people speculating about life on other planets, but alongside such goofiness there are also some illuminating revelations. For one thing, I'd never appreciated Hitler's deep hatred for Christianity, and the Catholic Church in particular, until I read him seize every available opportunity to express it in these Conversations.

While it's not the full picture of the man and comes with some caveats (not least that they were originally compiled – and therefore curated – by Hitler's fanatically loyal secretary Martin Bormann), Hitler's Wartime Conversations is perhaps the closest primary source we have for an insight into one of the most dangerous radicals in history. Hitler as shown here is banal, intelligent and in full awareness of what he is doing, has done, and will do. And that, to me, is far more educating, revealing – and unnerving – than the cartoon villain that so many still cling to. show less

To begin with, this rating does not validate or support the views of the book, but serves as a marker where the book helps us understand where these ideas originate from.

It is simply impossible to understand intricate evil such as the ideals of 'Mein Kampf' without understanding it thoroughly. Too many views in literature (or in GoodReads reviews on this site) use hand-waving language to describe such ideas as crazy, insane, or stupid, where the evil expressed within is none of these things show more - but instead a cold, calculating, and complicated mentality of hatred and xenophobia. In other words, without understanding where Hitler is coming from, you can't fully comprehend the magnitude of the evil that was his vision for the world - or how to actively guard against it in the future.

The profound elements of this book are not commonly reported. For starters, Hitler goes into detail on his childhood and early adult years, where he describes himself as viewing anti-Semites as uneducated, uncouth, and stupid. Hitler discusses in intimate detail how, rather than simply being born an anti-Semite and self-declared racial supremacist, he had to learn to become one. Indirectly, we also learn why such ideas were able to take root in the minds of Hitler and others in a similar situation, where Habsburg Austria and WW1 Germany were horrible for the common man. Widespread starvation and commonplace poverty make many susceptible to ideals they would otherwise brush away as wrong.

Later, we come to further understand how the NSDAP formed and organized itself, and tried to make a name for itself in the early 1920s. These details are important for historians to understand how such organizations grow from nothing to govern thousands of members, particularly in an environment of desperation and political uncertainty.

Aside from frequent anti-Semitism, racism, classism, and random exclamations of hatred for non-ethnic Germans, the book is quite overwritten, and repeats itself many times for many points.

To know evil, it is important to understand what it really is, and where it came from. Contrary to what Hollywood may show or what simplistic public school textbooks may try to pawn off, evil does not exist in a vacuum. It evolves and grows from its environment, and can be stopped or healed at various stages of its infancy. Reading Mein Kampf serves two purposes: one, to really understand the evil of Nazism and how it grew, and two, to understand how future movements of a similar nature may be prevented from taking root. Simply disregarding this book due to a vehement distaste for the author only perpetuates the ignorance and misconceptions surrounding the true evil of Nazism - it wasn't inevitable, and instead was slowly learned by millions in an environment that encouraged its growth and a culture that was ambivalent to its rise.

The details of Hitler's early life here may be used to prevent future catastrophes around the world. This book should be read by historians and any students mature and rational enough to read through its propaganda and racism in order to help prevent similar evil from arising in the future. show less

"Jews here and Jews there and Jews everywhere." (pg. 410)

As a graduate of modern history and a World War Two buff, I've always felt I should read Mein Kampf – I've certainly read about its results. And as someone with an odd sense of humour, I've always sort of liked the idea of reading Mein Kampf ironically, and then writing a no doubt hilarious straight-faced review about how the source material doesn't match up to all the films based on it (Saving Private Ryan, etc.), let alone the live show more re-enactment.

The book's actually quite hard to get hold of nowadays for a decent price, considering it's in the public domain (I guess no one wants the copyright, and besides, they keep the price on academic editions artificially high to deter neo-Nazi looky-loos). Not that I wanted Mein Kampf for a coffee-table book, of course, but nor did I want to inadvertently bung money towards some far-right self-publisher on Amazon and end up on a government watchlist. But I still wanted a serviceable copy. I can't imagine anything worse than buying a used, well-thumbed edition of Mein Kampf – it'd be like buying second-hand underpants – so the edition I eventually chose was a Jaico edition from India; relatively cheap but brand new (the swastika has less stigma attached to it over there). This edition, however, proved to be chock full of typos, printing errors and misalignments. But then again, if there's one book you're probably allowed to treat shabbily, it's this one.

It's probably not a surprise to learn that a book by Adolf Hitler is awful; what's surprising is that it's even more awful than you imagine. Of course, there's all the stuff about the Jews and race and the cleansing power of war, which is more than a tad strong, but that's to be expected: it is Mein Kampf, after all. But you'd expect the book to have a certain raciness, a perverse entertainment factor at being so woefully inappropriate.

Unfortunately, this isn't the case: even read ironically, this is a terrible experience. It's absolute dreck: tedious, tautological rambling for six hundred (!) pages, lacking any lyrical or structural writing ability whatsoever. It has a handful of ideas which it then unpacks, repacks and unpacks and repacks and unpacks over and over again with complete ideological mercilessness. In reading this ironically, my commitment to the bit rather backfired, for the only book less appealing than Mein Kampf is Mein Kampf unabridged.

Another surprise is that, for the most part, the book is rather banal: it is My Struggle, a political memoir by an upstart radical politician talking with super-sincerity about his journey and his political 'awakening'. With its obsession with racial hierarchies and reinventing the political wheel, all in the name of the 'ordinary, hard-working folks', the book confirms what I have long suspected about political discourse, even (perhaps especially) in our current time: the extremists dominate the discussion because they have far more stamina for this tedious business than reasonable people do. Any sane person will find reading this book an arse-ache; but, by Christ, imagine writing it.

One unironical impression I got from the book saw me put my history graduate cap on: the extent to which Mein Kampf was a blueprint for all that came later. Some eminent historians, such as Ian Kershaw, have cited passages about 'extermination' of Jews as evidence the Holocaust was always intended. Personally, I didn't get this from the book: certainly, the Jews are repeatedly identified by Hitler as the ultimate and implacable enemy, but there's no grand plan offered here. As it stands, I'm of the mind that what eventually became the Holocaust was an escalation, exacerbated by the war. What is beyond doubt is that war and persecution was certainly intended: Hitler makes no bones about seeking 'lebensraum' in the East and in reversing the Versailles treaty: in his mind, the latter speaks to a wider trend of German disgrace and impurity, which can only be purged by a great blood-letting. When he writes of feeling "calm and cool" at the recognition there will have to be a war "by the whetted sword" (pg. 561), or that the "coming struggle" against Russia will be under conditions that "assume the character of sheer slaughter" (pg. 589), you can't help but feel disconcerted, knowing as we do what was to be initiated by this man.

That said, the book was published seven years before Hitler was elected and thirteen years before war broke out, so that's a long time for ideas and strategies to change. Hitler himself even said, to one of his cronies year later, that he would never have written Mein Kampf if he had known he was going to become chancellor of Germany. You can also see why, despite the fanaticism evident in the book, statesmen in the 1930s thought Hitler might be an ally, or at least harmless or controllable. He is resolutely anti-Marxist in these pages, as well as indulging in some of your meat-and-drink demagoguery and rah-rah trade unionism; what becomes clear is that he is very much a national socialist, even though not a Marxist, and many of his converts in the early years came from the left (those George Orwell later identified as communists "who will be fascists five years hence"). If you try to read the book from the perspective of 1926, rather than with the knowledge of what happened between 1939 and 1945, it's much harder to pin him down as such an apocalyptic threat – certainly by the mores of the time, with anti-Semitism a common prejudice, Marxism resurgent, and Germany paupered. From a historical perspective, such a dangerous knot of complacency and power is fascinating to try to assess.

And, taking my history-grad cap off again, it's much harder to pin him down when the book is so bloody tedious. Not an ounce of real personality comes through in six hundred pages. It says a lot that Hitler was later embarrassed by its publication; the man had one bollock, shit facial hair and chronic flatulence, to say nothing of being the berk who both started World War Two and lost it, so for Mein Kampf to be the one thing that left him rather sheepish only illustrates its abject awfulness. He should have at least included a few funny anecdotes. show less

What can one say? There are certainly bits of brilliant deductions contained within; there are also bits of lunacy. To say that Hitler was a Machiavellian and he believed that the ends justify the means is an understatement. I found parts of the book to be fairly interesting (especially at the beginning) and other parts the rambling of a mad man. If I evaluate the content of the book; it is at least average. If I evaluate the writer, now that we know him from history; that is another rating. show more I believe after reading this book I do understand the mind of Hitler better. I'm glad I read this book as I now think I understand all of European history a little bit better from 1918-1945; and just not from the Allied perspective. 389 pages show less