Bookstorm

I'm reading Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf again. It's been several months since I've picked it up and, in starting it once more, I'm reminded of why I put it aside in the first place: it's the most chilling book I've ever read. Even if I could ignore the author's reputation, I'd still be frightened--Hitler's ultra-conservative views on marriage, prostitution, and education are eerily similar to the views espoused by some evangelical Christians. Yet Hitler is able to take his stance on eugenics to an unsurprising level of barbarity:

The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind.

Several months ago, when I first started Mein Kampf, I wouldn't have recommended it to any but the most stalwart reader. It's not a book one reads for enjoyment. It's tiresome, poorly-written, confusing, and completely devoid of any literary value. But, as Abraham Foxman writes in his introduction, "... Mein Kampf's existence denies the free world the excuse of ignorance." Often, the passage of time brings a sort of acceptance that's dulled by an endless repetition of movies, books, and history classes. We know the statistics. We know the conditions of the concentration camps. We know the methods used by the Nazis. But to read Mein Kampf--as distasteful as it may be--is to deny yourself historical interpretation and, on a deeper level, to confront the hatred that lay at the heart of the National Socialist movement.

Mein Kampf has the unsettling ability to close the gap of time. Sometimes I want to rage at Hitler and his unfathomable ignorance, but more often than not (given that this was the book that started a world war), I find myself reading with an acute sense of sadness, anger, and fear. Despite the fact that Hitler is dead and defeated, and that his political theories have long been discredited, his legacy still resonates loud and clear in today's world.

I hate Norman Mailer. I hate myself for reading The Castle in the Forest. Moreover, I hate myself for thoroughly enjoying The Castle in the Forest. The reason is quite simple: I find myself actually sympathizing with Adolf Hitler.

I'm going to hell for this post.

On the heels of finishing the first part of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, I came across this interesting passage, from Peter D. Kramer's Against Depression:

The Renaissance sustained several simultaneous traditions of melancholy. Cervantes began his literary career with a long pastoral poem, full of pining and tearful shepherds suffering from unrequited love. Don Quixote makes use of a different version of melancholy, the comical inspiration of the madman. These traditions flourished for centuries, but they have not been sustained by it. Jean Canavaggio, the great biographer of Cervantes, writes that:

[M]adness--as Michel Foucault has brilliantly demonstrated--is now a source for uneasiness for us: it is incongruous, even indecent, to make fun of a madman, as our ancestors loved to do; and we perceive as tragic the loneliness of the hero that Cervantes shows us misunderstood by everyone. In a word, the distance that separates our view of Don Quixote from the one that classical Europe formed of him reflected, beyond any doubt, a profound evolution of customs and sensibilities.

In the case of insanity, what it is to us changed to meet the medical understanding. And then what emerged in our reading of the Quixote was the hero's loneliness and alienation from his fellows.