Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
We finish the list with what is without simultaneously the worst-written and most dangerous piece of prison literature ever produced, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’). In 1923, planning to seize control of Bavaria and to topple the Weimar Republic from thence, Hitler led 2, 000 Nazis to the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich, where the state commissioner, Gustav von Kahr, was addressing an assembly of 3, 000 people. The coup, known as the Munich Putsch, failed miserably, and Hitler was arrested after 2 days in hiding. He was sentenced to 5 years’ imprisonment in Landsberg Prison for high treason.
Whilst in prison, Hitler got to work on his autobiography, Mein Kampf, building on the attention he had attracted during his trial for the Munich Putsch. The solitude of prison can often bring out the best in a writer, as the examples above demonstrate, but Hitler’s incarceration produced a self-indulgent, badly-written, turgid, and wildly-inaccurate account of his life, to say nothing of its repulsive immorality. Nevertheless, the preposterous precepts set out in Mein Kampf – anti-Semitism, lebensraum, the superiority of the Aryan race – informed the ideological basis for the Nazi Party’s atrocities after they seized power in 1933.
Mein Kampf was banned in Germany until 2016, when the copyright owned by the Bavarian government (who refused to publish it) ended. One feels, however, that even the most committed Neo-Nazi would think twice about their beliefs after reading the grandiloquent Mein Kampf. The autobiography unintentionally reveals the ludicrous foundation for many of Hitler’s beliefs; Hitler’s anti-Semitism, for example, originated in his dislike of the theatre in Vienna, in which many actors were Jewish. Any annotated edition will also reveal the pure fabrications made, such as Hitler’s claims to academic excellence, which contemporary school reports posthumously discovered entirely discredit.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. by Victor Watts. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998.
Bronson, Charles. Solitary Fitness. Ed. Stephen Richards. Gateshead: Mirage, 2007.
Bronson, Charles, and Robin Ackroyd. Bronson. London: Blake, 2009.
Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. Ed. by W.R. Owens. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. by Ralph Manheim. London: Hutchinson, 1999.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail. London: Penguin, 2018.
Lindsay, Thomas M. Luther and the German Reformation. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1900.
Nelson, Max. “Unseen, Even of Herself”, The Paris Review, November 17, 2015.
Polo, Marco. The Travels. Trans. by Ronald Latham. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004.
Raleigh, Walter. The History of the World. Ed. by C.A. Patrides. London: Macmillan, 1971.
Vinaver, Eugene, ed. Malory: Complete Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Wilde, Oscar. Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. London: Collins, 2003.