(What follows is the first in a series of posts regarding my reading of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.)

Though the second half of the twentieth century discredited the political theories presented in Mein Kampf and left them to the outer fringes of society, the book’s importance cannot be understated: after all, this is the book that started a world war, a book that, by its very mention, can make people uncomfortable. It’s impossible to approach Mein Kampf without some preconceived ideas of what it contains: with over six million Jews, as well as others whom Hitler deemed “undesirable,” left dead in its wake, the book is rightly the most notorious political tract of the last century, filled with hyperbole, hatred, and anger. Inevitably, the question arises: why read Mein Kampf at all?

I’ve been struggling with this question since starting the book. Obviously, Mein Kampf isn’t a book one reads for enjoyment (and, to be sure, its style—dense, tiresome, and grossly overwritten—as well as its reputation, makes any sort of enjoyment impossible). And though one could make the case that Hitler is giving himself the kind of importance he didn’t deserve when the book was written—he wrote the first half of Mein Kampf while in prison and the second half before entering German politics—the book is more than a narcissist’s wet dream. Here, Hitler lays out his political theories with startling clarity and foresight, revealing himself as a man who literally believed everything he wrote, who announced his intentions for Germany long before he became chancellor. The book was largely ignored prior to World War II, but therein lies its importance: its dismissal carried disastrous and tragic consequences. As Elie Wiesel once wrote, “Not being a professional historian, I take on this essay with fear and trembling. That’s because, although defeated, although dead, this man is frightening.”

Chapter I: In the Home of My Parents

From the first page of Mein Kampf, Hitler makes his intentions quite clear, with the second paragraph amounting to a declaration of war:

People of the same blood should be in the same Reich. The German people have no right to engage in a colonial policy until they shall have brought all their children together in one State. When the territory of the Reich embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the need of the people to acquire foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the daily bread for the generations to come.

The first chapter of Mein Kampf is largely an examination of Hitler’s youth, but there’s a formula here: he doesn’t offer much in the way of what his childhood was like (though he mentions “juvenile disputes” with his father and says his ”oratorical skills” came from singing in the church choir); instead, self-examination—the hallmark of any autobiography—is used to give insight into how his intense nationalism began to form. He describes how he discovered his father’s books on the Franco-German War of 1870-71: “And from that time onwards I became more and more enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected with war or military affairs.” At the age of eleven, Hitler rejected the idea of becoming a civil servant, citing a “profound hatred” for the Austrian state and, in particular, the Habsburg Empire, which he accuses of showing favoritism towards Czechs and allowing the “poison of foreign races” to dilute the blood of the German people.

Hitler makes little mention of his mother and relegates her death to one (almost dismissive) paragraph at the end of the chapter. This is striking, since some historians and teachers (and, in particular, the documentary Portrait of a Tyrant) have long contended that he blamed a Jewish doctor for her death, with this blame ultimately blossoming into the Holocaust. But, as chapter two reveals, this may be an oversimplification of Hitler’s anti-Semitism; the “mother” explanation ignores his burgeoning political convictions, which start taking shape upon his arrival in Vienna, Austria.