In launching a new paperback series on important writers titled How to Read... (e.g., How to Read Shakespeare), W.W. Norton is including How to Read Hitler, by British historian Neil Gregor.


[July 18, 2005] marked the 80th anniversary of the publication of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the future Nazi leader's autobiography and manifesto.
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Every year, American publishers flood stores with books about Nazism, driven by authors who can't stop writing them and consumers who can't stop reading them.
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But no publisher chose to add a new edition of Mein Kampf.
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Yet the smallest crack in the usual silence about the Nazi leader's own writing will take place in September.
In launching a new paperback series on important writers titled How to Read... (e.g., How to Read Shakespeare), W.W. Norton is including How to Read Hitler, by British historian Neil Gregor.
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Hitler preferred the title Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. His publisher, Max Amann, knew how to edit.
Mein Kampf took off after Hitler became Reich chancellor in 1933, selling 1.5 million copies in that year alone. By 1934, it became a textbook. Soon, newly married German couples were required to buy it. In the Third Reich's remaining 11 years, it became virtually obligatory in German homes, selling nearly nine million copies by 1945.
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Hitler on propaganda, for instance, sounds like a modern American political consultant going off the record:

"The receptivity of the great mass is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan."
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Today, as the world confronts an ideological successor to Nazism - the "Spare No One" slaughter of innocents practiced by Islamic fascism - Mein Kampf continues to be snapped up in the same Muslim societies that supported Hitler in the 1940s.
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Gregor's work misses that whole dimension, but provides a slight antidote to the more sympathetic reading of Mein Kampf by its Arabic translator, Luis al-Haj. He wrote in his preface: "National Socialism did not die with the death of its herald. Rather, its seeds multiplied under each star."

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