Hitler's Library

Epilogue: Farewell to the World of Hitler and His Library

Epilogue Farewell to the World of Hitler and His Library Hitler’s library documents a sinful and criminal subculture. Our browsing through the library has shown how the thoughts buried there became part of the “granite foundation”—to use an expression from Mein Kampf—of the Hitlerian world view, a view that at times sacrificed acknowledgement of its actual sources, as in the cases of Dinter or Feder, for example. Something that Nazi authors shared beyond their worldview was their fate: they were immensely pathetic, unhappy, and pitiful people. Hitler was deeply honest in his letter (with all its linguistic and spelling mistakes) to the Magistrate of Linz in 1914, in which he made excuses for going to Germany instead of completing his military service: “Youth, and what that beautiful word means, I have never known.”1 These same pitiful people were often ridiculous too, and having acquired terrible knowledge they covered up their ridiculousness, first with demonic poses and later with horrifying crimes. They justified their sins with their worldview, and the central figure of this “worldview” could only be the Führer. His command called for the committal of sin and gave absolution from those sins. Hitler’s “granite worldview”—as he called it, which was assembled from his readings—is a burden that still weighs upon humanity today. His expressionless face hides dark dimensions. It is interesting, however, to reflect on just how little the contemporaries who dealt with Hitler and his movement’s relationship to arts or intellectual trends attended to the meaning of what he said: they missed the internal mental structure operating amidst his torrents of words. Ernst Nolte, one of Heidegger’s students who praised Hitler for a while, drew attention to such mental 148 Hitler’s Library structures in his often-cited work (with its very apt title): Fascism in its Own Era. Its view is a phenomenological one, and the essence of this view is expressed by a hero from one of the grand novels investigating consciousness written by the deceased Nazi writer Ernst von Salomon: “It is difficult to give any specific definition of National Socialism, and there is no other option than to call it a ‘phenomenon,’ a distorted monster of life, which knows no limits and spreads in all directions.”2 So Hitler was a unique phenomenon with his theology of nature and his neo-pagan polytheism. This phenomenon was not the logical continuation of past processes, but something new and different, and it is to be studied as a product of its own era and measured against its own contemporaries. Victor Klemperer, a lecturer in French literature, approached Nazism from a linguistic perspective. During the 1930’s he happened to be studying precisely the Enlightenment when he was made to live through the “Brownshirt” period in a Jewish house in Dresden (his wife was an Aryan). His “working conditions” were harsh, as it was forbidden for a Jew to read any work by Hitler or his colleagues. Thus he listened primarily to radio speeches, or rather he did when he could, as for obvious reasons he did not always have the opportunity or the inclination to do so. Thus Mein Kampf remained a secret. On February 10, 1944 he noted: “I really got stuck into Mein Kampf (the first 200 pages from the 800), and it is as fascinating as it is repulsive and depressing—the publication of this book made this man the Führer and gave him eleven years of power! The German upper class is never to be forgiven for that!”3 The alpha and omega of Klemperer’s analysis is language, because language “rules my emotions and it guides my entire existence,” as he put it in 1957 in his work entitled the LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii, meaning “The Language of the Third Reich”), which summarizes his experiences as written in his diary.4 He found the origins of the Nazi world to be rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by examining the use of language, vocabulary, and the shifts in the meanings of words. Klemperer explained Nazism as a perverted form of Romanticism, and he believed that the Nazi Hitler and the Zionist Herzl were both products of this Romanticism.5 But by the time his book was published, the author was bound to silence by Communist Party discipline. However, in his diaries, where these same thoughts can be found, more can be found on the subject. One of the best...