I’ve noticed this weird thing where people hold up somebody else having read Mein Kampf as like… proof they’re a Nazi, and maybe it’s me, but i’m struggling really hard here with this, and I think that there are some probably not considered assumptions about how reading and exposure to ideas works in that idea.
Like, I find it just incredibly doubtful that most Nazis have ever read it, or that it would convince anyone of the merits of Nazism. And I want to be clear, here I’m saying this as somebody who read it as a teenager. I came out of that experience thinking that Germany was absolutely stupid for banning it on the idea that it was so dangerous that no one should ever read it, because the ideas in here were so terrible. I came out thinking that strategy does a lot of harm. Because yes, the idea is in here are so terrible, and also Hitler is so deeply incoherent and unpersuasive in expressing them. No one is going to be convinced by Mein Kampf, and the only people who do find it convincing were already convinced before they read it.
In fact I would go so far as to say I think we should be reading at least exerpts of Mein Kampf in high school history, because nothing demystifies Hitler, and dispells this common image of him as this evil genius pied piper, who bespelled Germany, like reading his paranoid, hate fueled, and I can’t stress this enough, incoherent ramblings.
We treat Mein Kampf like it’s the fucking necronomicon. When I read it in high school, the school librarian reported me to the vice principal. Everything about this experience told me that this book was dangerous that it was something I needed to treat very seriously. It didn’t live up to the hype. I came away from reading it thinking that clearly nobody who supported the Nazis had ever read it. They might have owned it, it might have sat on their bookshelf, but they certainly never read it, because if they had they would have realized that Hitler wasn’t just evil and completely detached from reality, he was also not very smart.
Now, admittedly I am a Jew and I was reading it in high school, because I wanted to know why somebody would want to kill all of my people. I was not going to be an easy audience to persuade under any circumstances. But the point is that I found reading Mein Kampf very valuable, if incredibly unpleasant. It gave me tremendous insight into how the Nazis saw themselves and the world and how they understood what they were doing. It helped me understand how something like the Holocaust comes to seem reasonable, and it helped me contextualize and understand a lot of the modern antisemitism that I have to deal with, epecially the conspiratorial varieties. It helped remind me of that great truth that almost nobody believes they are doing evil. No matter how evil what they are doing is, they believe themselves to be in the right.
I think we need to acknowledge that there are plenty of reasons to read Mein Kampf that do not include agreeing with Hitler or being willing to be persuaded by him. It is the straight from the horse’s mouth explanation of Nazi ideology and anyone who wants to understand the Nazis and Hitler, has a reason to read it, and even reread it and study it.
