Hubevents Notes: Quotes from On Hitler's Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism

On Hitler's Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism by Albrecht Koschorke

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017

ISBN 9780262533331

(page 12) … the success of nationalism, which is certainly the most powerful European ideology of the last two hundred years.

(16) Ethnonationalist “intellectuals” according to Jacques Sémelin in Purify and Destroy: The Political Use of Massacre and Genocide: It would probably be more accurate to refer to them as “identity entrepreneurs…”

(20-21) Sober assessment from a distance often discerns ridiculous features that were not evident at the time.

That said, a greater proximity exists between laughable events and dreadful ones than calmer ages would like to admit.

(26) All of these dictatorial books [books written by dictators] play a central role in cleansing operations that break with the past and, at the same time, reinvent it to self-aggrandizing ends. These works counter the confusion of the present, which seems to offer no stay, with a rigorous - and ultimately terroristic - will to order. A combative aversion to the tumult detected everywhere is inscribed in them and constitutes their driving force. To understand their authors’ motivations, it is important to recognize that terror and catharsis, fear and purification, do not occur only in ancient tragedies; they also play a role in modern ideologies of power. This fact holds in spite of the familiar irony that dictators usually increase the very chaos they pretend to oppose - only to fall victim, in the end, to the spiraling disorder they have whipped on to even greater fury.

(32) All the while, Hitler - the son of a civil servant who had risen socially and joined the bourgeoisie - presents a picture of the lower classes that is deeply divided. As an amorphous, blind “mass,” they earn his hatred and scorn. As the Volk, they are idealized. This is precisely what sets Hitler’s view apart from the Social Democratic party platform. In contrast to the Marxian concept of class, the key term for Hitler is Volk, which he conceived of as an ethnic and national unit from the very beginning. Two fundamentally divergent assessments of political conflict follow from this difference. Division along the lines of class sees social struggles occurring between the top and the bottom. This entails an internationalist orientation: the Workers’ International faces the International of Capital. Whereas with this model, the line of social division is horizontal, the nationalist perspective - especially in the extremist, biologistic form that Hitler advocates - sees a vertical principle of separation at work.

(34) The role of Führer, which combines the communitarian pathos of populism with authoritarian contempt for the crowd, is already in evidence [in Mein Kampf].

(35) In keeping with his maxim that the public’s objections must be rebutted preemptively, Hitler presents his “transformation into an anti-Semite” as the result of an arduous inner struggle - practically a religious conversion. Only with great effort, he lets it be known, did he overcome his original tolerance in matters of religion - which formerly had prompted him to take offense at anti-Jewish campaigns in the press. Time and again, he admits, he suffered “relapses.” But now that the battle against toleration, humanitarian considerations, and good taste is over, Jewish world conspiracy offers a phantasm that smooths over any and all gaps in his line of argument. By identifying Marxism as the central element in this plot, Hitler can declare himself the savior of the German Volk and proceed to annex the people to his worldview: “Only a knowledge of the Jews provides the key with which to comprehend the inner, and consequently real, aims of Social Democracy.”

(36) This conspiracy theory [anti-Semitism] is as difficult to attack as any other. To outsiders, it seems so thoroughly murky as not to warrant serious engagement. What is more, it possesses a built-in mechanism that makes it resistant to disproof: anyone seeking to refute it may be accused of having already fallen for the ruses of the Jewish press, thereby proving the theory’s accuracy. In this manner, the theory seals itself off from the outside and achieves inner coherence. For the movement’s followers, its attractiveness lies in precisely this closeness, which ensures a strong group identity internally and projects a figure of the enemy externally. From the leader’s standpoint, the call to counter the conspiracy represents a conditional offer of love that weaves together promises and threats: follow me, and let yourselves be molded into a people according to my vision so I won’t be forced to despise and destroy you

(37) This [Mein Kampf’s denigration of the masses for being too lazy to read and between the lines praise for those who keep reading his book] fits with Hannah Arendt’s observation that totalitarian regimes are organized on the model of secret societies and operate according to a system distinguished by subtle gradations of participation.

(41) Actual propaganda - Hitler leaves no room for doubt on this score - does not play out in the medium of writing but in declamatory agitation. Only an orator can instantly gauge the public’s reaction and adjust what he says accordingly, “until at length even the last group of an opposition, by its very bearing and facial expression, enables him to recognize its capitulation to his arguments”; only through speech, not written instruction, can the “resistance of emotions” be overcome.

(42) When the “accuracy or inaccuracy of propaganda” is measured only in terms of “success,” it closes itself off into a tautological circle of self-verification: it garners belief because it presents itself as the truth, and it counts as true because the masses believe in it.

(43) Counter to what such enlightened optimists [those who view only error, blindness, or illusion at work in demagoguery] believe, the demagogue - along with those in his train - usually knows full well what he is doing. He does not advance his claims _in spite of_ the fact that they will offend reasonable people but _because_ he can be sure to provoke them by doing so. The reflexive outrage he triggers does not unsettle him; rather it affords him a kind of contemptuous exhilaration.

(46) Emptiness and resolve do not stand in contradiction; they complement and complete each other.

(47) The Vienna mayor Karl Lueger - Hitler’s foremost model in terms of populist animosity towards Jews - is said to have declared, “I decide who’s a Jew!”

… Goebbels: Christ cannot have been a Jew. I do not need to prove this with science or scholarship. It is so!

(48) Goebbels’ novel Michael: As in Hitler’s account of his life, academic failure becomes part of a self-image that no longer pays heed to objections voiced by scholars and scientists. Instead - and pithily, in his own fashion - Goebbels stresses empty readiness to believe as the character trait defining the war generation: “Youth today is more alive than ever before. Youth believes. In what? That is the gist of the struggle.” This will to believe, without aim as yet, is the vessel into which Hitler - coded in the novel as a nameless, charismatic orator - would pour his ideological decisionism.

(49) By Hitler’s account, the we group incorporates everyone who feels uplifted by seeing enemies beaten bloody in order to put a halt to disagreement once and for all.

(50) A menacing vacuum emanates from Mein Kampf - a license for adherents to react to opposition with a “Just you wait!” that bristles with lustful sadism.

… The cabaret artist Serdar Somuncu, who performed readings from Mein Kampf in the 1990s, put it this way: “Hitler plus power is gruesome, but Hitler minus power is a comedy.”

NB: Mel Brooks

(55) All the while (on a harmonic register, as it were), Mein Kampf communicates another desire (and pleasure) too, one that savors the power of empty words that make an impact - the fascination of power deriving strictly from its own ascent which fashions itself out of nothing.

(63) The primary objective of ideological pronouncements is _power of authority_.

(63-64) The secret to its [language of authority] success lies, not least of all, in its own self-intoxication. Anyone who adopts this language comes to share in its transports. This is the “Dionysian” component of fanatical movements.

This autocatalytic effect is one of the reasons that the leader need not _believe_ all that he says. Nor does his audience have to, either. All that is necessary is for both sides to come to an understanding that they will base their community on ostentatious adherence to extreme pronouncements, embrace the transports of self-intoxication, and trouble outsiders with their triumphal displays.

(76) Joseph Goebbels, Michael (NY: Amok, 1987), a novel: “Intellect is a danger to the development of the character.”

(77) Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 384-385: “In distinction to the mass membership which, for instance, needs some demonstration of the inferiority of the Jewish race before it can safely be asked to kill Jews, the elite formations understand that the statement, all Jews are inferior, means, all Jews should be killed.”

… Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1991, page 288: “The National Socialist ideology was no matter of faith for most of these young, career-oriented experts. It simply offered them the most room to act freely.”

More notes and quotes from my readings on Nazis, Fascism, and tyranny:

Hubevents Notes

Friday, June 28, 2024

Quotes from On Hitler's Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism

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