“Reviewers were not impressed” by the first volume of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, published 100 years ago today, said Michael Bryant, a professor at Bryant University. “They panned the book, and the writer of the book, for irrelevance, for illogicality, for grammatical mistakes, for the offensive manner of the argumentation.”
And yet. Within five years of the book’s publication, the worldview Hitler laid out in it — rooted in the idea, Bryant said, “that the Jews were part of a conspiracy to overthrow all higher culture” — had turned Hitler into a definitional figure in German politics, and laid the first bits of groundwork for the Holocaust.
Mein Kampf is a text that simply will not stop being relevant. When an AI chatbot built by Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, starts calling itself “MechaHitler” while spewing contemporary versions of theories that sound awfully like its namesake’s, it raises questions about where all this came from — questions that one of the most poisonous books in history might be essential to answering.
I spoke with Bryant by Zoom; he’s currently in Nuremberg, Germany, teaching a course on the Holocaust and law. He devoted more than two years to studying a critical, highly annotated edition of Mein Kampfissued in 2016, when the book’s copyright in Germany lapsed. The experience, he said, was both “punishing” and revelatory, especially in a moment when some characteristics of Hitler’s politics are once more ascendant worldwide.
“Suddenly, there’s a return of so many of these ideas; even the style of politics, of fascism, is coming back into vogue,” Bryant said. “And for me, the essence of fascism is this: It's an effort to mobilize society against alleged internal and external enemies in order to centralize power in a single person.”
From his current vantage point in Germany, he sees signs of that essence in the far-right Alternative for Germany party. And these themes are “making the rounds in country after country,” he said, “including, some would argue, even in our own United States of America.”
So, “why should we re-read such a bad book?” Bryant asked. Because it can “help us to understand that many of these ideas have not gone away.”
We’ve published quite a bit about Mein Kampf over the years — including a recent essay by Terrence Petty, author of multiple books about the Nazi regime.
