IT WAS AT THE BEGINNING OF November 1933 — two months after, almost by
accident, I had attended that year’s Nuremberg rally — that Lee Hindley, my
English teacher at my boarding school in Sandwich, Kent, handed me a rather
forbidding looking book of which she said I needed to read as much as I
could. “It might help you make some sense of what you saw in Nuremburg,” she
said. I was 12 and the book was Mein Kampf, which, I learnt from the
quickly skimmed foreword, had only recently been published (abridged) in
English (eight years later I would read the full version, in German).
Although I would stay for three years at Stonar House, where, except for
25-year-old Miss Hindley who was a passionate communist, no one appeared
bothered by the Nazi cloud over Europe, my home then was Vienna, where
grown-ups in my mother’s world talked unendingly about the terrible Hitler:
a book written by him, even if manifestly too dense for easy reading, might
be intriguing.
The thick, closely printed tome was, in fact, almost unreadable for me. But
what did fascinate me at 12 years old was the story in the Introduction
about how it came to be.
Hitler conceived it in two volumes and wrote most of the first one, titled “A
Reckoning”, while in prison. Suspecting that the Bavarian Government had
been about to use a meeting in the Munich Burgerbraukeller to announce the
restoration of a monarchy in Bavaria, he had led 600 stormtroopers in a
demonstration march — the famous “Beer Cellar Putsch” of November 8, 1923,
in which 16 Nazis and three police were killed and Hermann Goering was
seriously wounded. Hitler, though managing to escape by car, was found and
arrested three days later and taken to jail, as were a number of his
comrades. These included his chauffeur Emile Maurice, to whom, three months
later, he was to dictate Volume I of Mein Kampf. A little later the
Bavarian police would also arrest Rudolf Hess and to whom, two years later,
back in liberty, Hitler would dictate Mein Kampf Volume II.
On February 26, 1924, a large audience and the full foreign press corps had
watched Hitler, heavier by 12 kilos (26lb) thanks to the jail’s good food
during his remand, turn the trial into a political forum from which he
launched a 2½-hour attack on the Weimar Republic. Nonetheless, and even
though half the panel of judges was inclined towards him, there was then
still a degree of justice in Germany. He was sentenced to five years in the
political block of the provincial prison in the fortress of the small town
of Landsberg near Munich, where Cell No 7 had been refurbished for the
famous prisoner and where by his release in December 1924, he had served 12
months.
His “cell” proved to be a large, airy room on the upper floor with a splendid
view over the countryside. Having suffered a shoulder injury in a fall the
day after the putsch, he was not required to take part in prison work, could
lounge around in his favourite garb of Lederhosen and was attended by a
number of volunteer prisoner “batmen” who cleaned his room, did his laundry
and served his meals. His jailers, he told a friend, treated him with
respect, some of them greeting him with “Heil Hitler”. The food was
“excellent” and the walks he took daily in the pleasant garden well suited
to reflection. He had a large desk for replying to the 3,000 letters from
admirers and a comfortable “sitting corner” (Sitzecke)
where he conversed with 500 visitors, until, after three months he announced
that visits had to stop to allow him to write.
But Volume I of Mein Kampf which he dictated then for six hours every
day and which was published on July 18, 1925, reflected in no way the peace
of that bizarre imprisonment. A very malign book both in the ferocity of its
anti-Semitism and his damnation of democracy, it feels almost like an
emotional explosion.
Many pages are devoted to his six years in Vienna — the city of his childhood
dreams and hopes, which he came to detest. He hated the overlords of the art
world who judged him unworthy as a painter; he loathed what he called the
“Jewish clever-cleverness” of its condescending press; he was repulsed by
the lightness of spirit of the Viennese girls; he detested the arrogance of
Vienna’s elite as much of the servility of its tradesmen. Most important
however, having expected to find Vienna a great German city, he was repelled
by the mixture of nationalities and languages, most of all by the many Jews
who seemed to him to dominate every aspect of Viennese existence.
Finally, watching the spectacle of Vienna’s noisy parliament, with MPs sitting
with their feet on tables, screaming at each other in all the languages of
the multinational empire he despised, he conceived a loathing for
parliamentary democracy.
On May 24, 1913, he left Vienna for Munich to dedicate the remainder of his
life to true “Germanism”, a commitment he proved most strikingly on August
3, 1914, when he signed up with a Bavarian regiment in which he served with
honour.
It was essentially the newfound security there in discipline and hierarchy,
his passion for uniforms, and his discovery in himself of leadership
qualities and an enormous gift for oratory which, after his misery in
Vienna, really started his political career. Among his rediscovered comrades
was Max Amann, sergeant major in his regiment, who would become the
publisher of Mein Kampf Volume I and in December 1926 Volume II, “The
National Socialist Movement”, a much calmer though achingly boring 300-page
book. This, Hitler’s rather hapless attempt to describe his ideology in
philosophical terms, he dictated in his flat in Munich, and typed some of it
himself with two fingers on an old machine.
None of the countless thinkers, historians and psychologists who have written
about Hitler have found an explanation for the two fanatical feelings that
ruled his life: his reverence for all that was German, and his abomination
of Jewry, with which he equated Marxism and Bolshevism — ie, Russia — social
democracy — the strongest political party in Austria — and above all Vienna
itself. These two obsessions dominated Mein Kampf, threw Europe into
chaos and eventually killed 50 million people.
But, sadly, history has shown that Mein Kampf, and the emotions and
political ideas he expressed in it, met with enormous resonance. By the end
of 1933, his first year in power, 1.5 million copies had been sold in
Germany; as of 1934 it became a school textbook; as of 1936 every bridal
couple received a copy; by April 1945 some eight to nine million copies had
been sold in Germany, 80,000 (abridged) in the UK, 17,000 in the US and an
unknown number in 14 languages other than German and English.
The world, it would seem, had waited for a man with Hitler’s ideas and never
asked questions until much too late. We cannot undo the past. But perhaps
today, the 80th anniversary of Mein Kampf’s first publication, we
could at least ask ourselves and others the question why this evil book has,
of all languages, been recently published in Arabic.
Who gets Adolf's millions?
- After the war, the state of Bavaria confiscated the German copyright to Mein
Kampf and banned all German printing. But elsewhere the state’s
power is limited: in March this year it was reported that Hitler’s tract
was topping bestseller charts in Turkey.
- Werner Maser, the administrator of the Hitler estate, has “absolutely no moral
reservations” about pursuing royalties for the family, although so far
he has been unsuccessful.
- Random House, UK rights owner (whose imprint Pimlico publishes the book) gave
£500,000 of royalties to the German Welfare Council over almost 25
years. In 2000 the council decided funding was “no longer appropriate”
and returned £250,000.
MEIN KAMPF by ADOLF HITLER
Pimlico, £18; 704pp
£16.20 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
