that was a great post
Read it too and for the same reasons. I'm from Frogland where the book is a taboo. You name the Nazis, you write tons of lines about them and their wrong doings in essays and in 3h long history tests but you do not even touch the book, which was banned at the time. The idea is that touching it would make you nazi too. It even seemed loaded with supernatural powers like Evil Dead's Necronomicon. So once I moved to the US I found it on a shelf, bought it and was surprised how freely I could do so.

Now, the book is a huge disappointment. There is no structure at all in it. It jumps from blaming the Versailles treaty to blaming his old friends, blaming other German politicians, blaming the jews and then jumps onto something else. Each chapter is some sort of collection of his random thoughts of the day. It sorts of become obvious that Mein Kampf wasn't a book that was meant to be read, it's more of a thing you had to be seen carrying or that should sit on your bookshelf to impress the neighbours.

I believe the entire German nation got coaxed into it and following the violent repressions of the socialists, democrats, competitors on the far right, people started to use that survival instinct and accept whatever happened next. The book in itself isn't the thing that got Hitler elected. At least that's my assessment.

Oh yes and "terrorists" burnt the Reichstag. And Poland has weapons of mass destr... err. I'm stopping it here.
(ultramarinegoat, Tue 20 May 2008, 2:12, Reply)