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(What follows is the second part of my series on Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Part one can be found here.)

One of the most striking aspects of Mein Kampf is the way in which Hitler continually evokes Fate as a way of explaining not only the plight of the German people, but also his own political rhetoric. When taken into the context of the time it was written—Germany was still suffering economically after the disaster of World War I and Hitler was languishing in prison after a failed attempt to seize power—Hitler’s bleak cynicism becomes almost understandable: he comes off as a man who is so convinced that his nationality is a race of Nietzschean supermen, who believes that Germany should rightfully be the center of world culture, that anything to the contrary is the result of outside forces—whether Fate, Jews, the Habsburg monarchy, or communists—conspiring to keep Germany from claiming the world throne. There’s an unmistakable air of Shakespearean tragedy running throughout these pages, though the tragedy isn’t so much sympathy for Hitler, but rather the German people.

In reading Mein Kampf, it’s not very difficult to see how Germany became so enamored with Hitler: the book is shameless propaganda, with Hitler appealing to nationalism and ethnic pride to frame his arguments. Unsurprisingly, we’re never given evidence for any of Hitler’s claims; the book is hopelessly one-sided, with anger and cynicism so vile that, given Germany’s economic, cultural, and military status after World War I, it’s understandable (though not reasonable) that the population would accept any scapegoat for its fall from grace. After all, Hitler asserts, it’s not Germany’s fault that she can’t rise from the mire of oppression; it’s the Jews, the communists, the French, the dissidents, the Czechs, the bourgeoisie, and the unfathomable stupidity of bumbling, opportunistic politicans seeking only to pacify the country’s enemies. Hitler’s appeals, made on purely emotional grounds, shed some light on his rise to power—by browbeating his readers with racist and political propaganda, he comes off as someone who’s so exasperating that you’d agree with him simply to get him to stop talking. Indeed, Hitler recounts several instances, in chapter two, in which he browbeat co-workers into agreeing with his views—though he credits their submission with his “oratorical skills.”

But Hitler’s eventual downfall would seem to be a foregone conclusion: like William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, his hunger for power is insatiable and obsessive, with Fate dictating ruin as the only possible outcome. Mein Kampf is one of those books that, once you begin reading it, a lot of parallels become apparent: Hitler, in his own way, is giving readers insight not only into how his own political convictions were formed, but how the political atmosphere was during those times.

Chapter II: Years of Suffering and Study in Vienna

Hitler arrived in Vienna, Austria when he was fifteen years old, shortly after his mother’s death. He describes his Vienna years as being the saddest in his life, but adds:

I am grateful that I was thrown into a world of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I was afterwards to fight.

It was during this period that my eyes were opened to two perils, the names of which I scarcely knew hitherto and had no notion whatsoever of their terrible significance for the existence of the German people. These two perils were Marxism and Judaism.

Chapter two is largely devoted to how Hitler developed such a profound hatred for Jews. The ways in which he arrives at his conclusions are ad hominem: he sympathizes with the working class, believing them to be the backbone of German society (after all, the laboring class makes up the vast majority of any society). He then goes on to describe how the Social Democratic Party—whose policy, in his words, was “to raise the level of the working classes”—failed to uphold its own principles: he accuses the Party of “poisoning the popular mind” with propaganda, of ignoring workers’ rights, and of trying to destroy Germany’s economy. But, he writes, “the features that contributed most to estrange me from the Social Democratic movement was its hostile attitude towards the struggle for the conservation of Germanism in Austria [and] its lamentable concotting with the Slav ‘comrades’ …” Then, after devouring countless newspapers devoted to Social Democratic ideals, and after noticing that many of the articles featured authors with Jewish names, he becomes convinced that Jews are behind the Social Democratic movement. He goes on to accuse Jews of numerous evils, from the dissemination of “smutty literature” to the “social phenomenon of prostitution” to exploitation of the working class.

To be sure, all this is very tiresome—and it only gets more and more tiring as the book progresses—but one thing that puzzles me is why he titled the book Mein Kampf. Maybe Ihr Kampf—Your Struggle—would’ve been a more apt title.