Why I Forked Over $55 for a Copy of Mein Kampf

Posted on by Erin Bartels

I mentioned yesterday that the last book I found at John King Books was the one that broke my budget. It became its own post because I felt I needed to offer an explanation as to why I shelled out $55 for this 1939 printing of the first unabridged English translation of Mein Kampf.

As the introduction explains, the text is fully annotated to explain the history behind events Hitler mentions in the text and to correct false information.

Click on the picture and enlarge to read some of what the editors of the annotated edition have to say about their work.

Now, why on earth would I want such a book? I’m not a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist, though a card tucked in the pages which we discovered once we were back home certainly suggests that those people are active and looking to recruit like-minded people…

I have smudged out the contact information, but in case you’re curious, this group is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Whatever my other reasons for buying this book, at least I have prevented the possible recruitment of another racist SOB.

One of the reasons I bought this book is that I am a student of history, particularly of the 20th century, and I am deeply interested in how historical events led to the world we live in today. I am also researching Adolf Hitler and the geopolitical realities of his lifetime for a series of books I hope to write someday. Thus, it is invaluable to have this pre-WWII view of the book and the man that changed the course of history. The editors are not looking back at Hitler through the historical lens of WWII and the Holocaust, but from the standpoint of what were to them current events. The introduction to this book mentions the reasoning behind the timing of this edition, and a preface even makes note of the tremendous speed at which they felt pressured to produce it.

In some ways, producing this book is a bit like people buying The Art of the Deal or other Trump-authored books after the election to see just what kind of man had come to power. This introduction was certainly written before the invasion of Poland in the fall of 1939 as it makes no mention of it. The world knew Europe was headed for conflict after Germany’s 1938 annexation of portions of Czechoslovakia, but it had no inkling of the scope of the war that would engulf the entire globe over the next six years. Seeing how they saw these events as they were unfolding rather than simply reading history from the standpoint of someone looking back in judgment — How could they have thought they could appease Hitler? How could they have turned a blind eye to what he was doing? — is vital for an honest, non-revisionist understanding of why world events happen as they do. It removes the “hindsight” glasses we are always inevitably wearing when we study history and allows us to see with the biases that the people of that time had.

When you read portions of Mein Kampf that deal with the question of race, and especially the Jewish people, you wonder how on earth anyone could believe any of it. While Hitler can even sound reasonable in some of his views of more political questions (even if you disagree with him, there are logical underpinnings to his arguments in this sphere), the logical leaps he makes when talking about race sound utterly absurd to us. How could anyone have followed this guy? We’ve all seen the newsreels. He was a raving lunatic. They must have all been brainwashed. I’ve even heard an acquaintance of mine say that she thought they must have been eating something bad or the water must have been poisoned for them to blindly follow him.

But that kind of talk removes responsibility from the real people who carry out horrific acts, and it makes those of us in the 21st century feel quite sure of our intellectual and moral superiority to those in the past. We would never do such things. No one could fool us the way Hitler fooled them.

Really?

The fact of the matter is, if you study even the century that led up to World War I, what do you find? Rampant antisemitism. What do you find after WWI? Rampant antisemitism. Leaders like Hitler cannot lead without a following. He struggled for years to gain his, but once he found the right combination of political views (including blaming the Jews for WWI and for the Marxist revolution in Germany after the war) and built the right kind of propaganda machine (which he talks about extensively in Mein Kampf) he found a very willing audience to listen to and applaud and follow him. They wanted someone to blame and they wanted someone to make Germany great again. He wasn’t a lunatic. He was a very clever man who knew how to convince people that he was going to fix everything that was wrong.

We live in a day when our president throws a lot of blame around. When it has been suggested that we register and track people of a particular religion. When the working class population is hard-pressed and suffering from long-term joblessness and wage stagnation. When we vote in someone from outside the establishment in order to shake things up. Our times are not so unlike those that led up to two of the most deadly and destructive wars in history (approximately 100 million people died as a result of WWI and WWII combined — that would be like the entire populations of California, Texas, New York, and Illinois combined…dead).

Now, I’m not equating Trump and Hitler. Trump’s a bumbling idiot muddling through a job he’s perhaps realizing he didn’t really want to do after all. Were Trump a decent orator, maybe (maybe) I’d be more concerned about him. (Aside: Imagine the crazy tweets Hitler would unleash if he’d had Twitter.) No, sir. Trump is no Hitler.

I’m simply saying that it’s important to study our history and to resist chronological snobbery, which suggests that since we live in a later time we are more enlightened or savvy or moral than those who lived in the past. We’re not. We must always be on guard against bad leadership and we must always be on guard against our own capacity to do evil…especially when we have convinced ourselves we are doing good.

Because the more pressing question, the more disturbing question is: Could we regular, everyday Americans be more like all those regular, everyday Germans in the 1930s than we think?

Why We Read Sad Books

Posted on by Erin Bartels

Gracious, it’s been May for four days already! Where is my life going? Oh, that’s right–I’m reading it away. From my 9-5 (oh, and it’s catalog time too), to beta reads for fellow writers in my two writing groups, to a freelance editing gig and a work-for-hire writing job, plus making slow but satisfying progress on my own manuscript, I’m awfully busy looking at, creating, deleting, and moving around words. This includes words I’m encountering for the first time as I attempt to learn German. Ich Heiβe Erin. Ich komme aus Michigan. Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch.

I’ve also started reading a couple new “real” books–you know, with covers and everything–after finishing up Spill Simmer Falter Wither (lovely and sad) and Lolita (anti-lovely and sad and twisted and I’m still not sure I’ve got a handle on what I think of it…).

I’m still very much in the beginnings of these long books, but it’s been a while since I read a memoir (Nafisi’s is one I’ve been wanting to read for years) and Ruth Ozeki’s book is very different/unique, especially when it comes to the contrast in the two voices. One of the beta reads I did last month was also extremely unique and played with time and even the form of the main characters as they transformed from boys and girls to a bear, an eagle, a fawn, and a sage plant.

In my reading, I’ve been far afield–Japan, Iran, the Pacific Northwest, New Hampshire, Ireland, and within a 400 year old Ojibwe legend. But in my writing, I have been enclosed–in a small cabin, in a small boat, on an isolated lake, with my main character focused on one point in time, one memory she must unravel. Is that why I’m interested in traveling far and wide in my choices of books to read? Were I writing a sprawling story right now, would I be reading something that was more contained, more restrictive?

Through the magic of Facebook memories (you know, those old posts that pop up and bid you share them once more) I saw this morning a photo I took of my not-quite-two-year-old son in a spring puddle. The trees in the photo are at least a week ahead of where the trees are now during our cold and rainy spring. The trees outside my office window are still tentative, still holding back, still a bit suspicious that winter may have one last punch to throw. They don’t know that the weatherman predicts temps in the 70s next week. They just know that right now, they’re still shivering.

When we’re feeling held tight or held back in life (by life?), we sometimes let our imaginations take us to all the new places we can’t quite reach. For some, that’s why they read at all–to travel to someplace new and be someone else for a while. I’m not sure I have ever had that exact feeling when choosing what to read next–I think I’d like to spend some time as a pedophile or I think I’d like to be a social outcast with a dog that brutally attacks other dogs while their owners look on, horrified. That’s Lolita and Spill Simmer Falter Wither. I didn’t choose to read those books because I wanted to be those people in those places. I chose Lolita because it was a classic I hadn’t yet read and I was curious about it since I knew it was controversial. I chose Spill Simmer Falter Wither because I heard the author, Sara Baume, interviewed on NPR while I was dropping my son off at school. It was a paragraph she read on air that made me buy the book immediately upon returning home, simply because I wanted to “listen” to her voice more.

In both cases, I knew enough to know these books would be downers. Already I know that Ozeki’s and Nafisi’s books could be downers. In Ozeki’s, the teenage diary writer alludes to the fact that she won’t be around long, hinting at suicide, and its clear that the diary washing up in the Pacific NW where Ruth finds it hints at the Fukushima disaster after the tsunami. In Nafisi’s, every one of these women is repressed, oppressed, or persecuted, prisoners of a regime that restricts them in every way possible. It cannot end all bright and happy and rainbows. At best it will be bittersweet. (No spoilers in the comments if you’ve already read it, please.)

So why do we read books like this? (And I realize not everyone does, but I do…Why?)

Maybe it’s because we know what it’s like to wait for a summer that is slow in coming, to look at bare trees, knowing they will leaf out sooner or later–they must, they always have–but with the knowledge there is nothing we can do to make it happen on our own timeline.

Maybe it’s because the fluffy book we read for an escape ends neatly, and what we really need is for someone else to acknowledge that life can be painful and beautiful and inexplicable all at the same time–and that it doesn’t always have a happy ending.

Maybe it’s because our most enduring feelings are those of loss, regret, confusion, and anger–those things we cannot reconcile with how we feel the world ought to be: peaceful, whole, healthy, loving.

Maybe it’s because we live in the in-between time, the already-but-not-yet, somewhere in the middle of the story of creation, fall, and redemption.

Deep down we know all things will be made right. We just wish it was now. And so we read books that acknowledge that longing, that grapple with all those unanswerable questions, that show us the darkness–but that also present to us at least one character who endures, who makes it through the long night, who lives on illuminated by a ray of hope.

I like sad books and sad movies. I like happy ones too. But there’s something about the ones that cause you pain that lasts in my memory while the happy ones fade quickly away.

What about you? Do you want your books to be a pure escape? Or do you like a little (or a lot) of reality thrown in, even if it’s a harsh reality? What’s the saddest book you’ve read? Would you recommend it to others? Why or why not?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.