My Struggle

My Struggle (1938) – Adolf Hitler

Hurst and Blackett | ISBN: None | Condition: Good

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Some books change the world through brilliant ideas, extraordinary imagination or profound insight into the human condition. Others change it because enough people take an appalling collection of prejudices, grievances and political fantasies seriously. Adolf Hitler’s My Struggle, better known by its German title Mein Kampf, belongs emphatically to the second category.

Written following Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and his subsequent imprisonment, this notorious combination of autobiography, political manifesto and sustained personal resentment laid out the ideological foundations of National Socialism. It is a book in which practically everything wrong with Germany, Europe and modern civilisation is blamed upon somebody else, usually with a remarkable disregard for evidence.

For a man supposedly possessed of historic insight, Hitler demonstrated an extraordinary inability to recognise his own shortcomings.

Published by Hurst and Blackett in 1938, this English-language edition is particularly interesting because of its historical timing. Britain was confronting the increasingly aggressive ambitions of Nazi Germany, the Munich Agreement would become synonymous with appeasement, and Europe stood on the brink of another catastrophic war.

The dictator’s intentions were hardly entirely concealed. Unfortunately, interpreting them correctly, confronting them effectively and persuading everyone else to take them seriously proved rather more difficult.

The book presents Hitler’s distorted interpretation of German history, his obsessive antisemitism, his racial theories, his hostility towards parliamentary democracy and his ambitions for territorial expansion. Its arguments are riddled with conspiracy theories, historical manipulation and the sort of self-important certainty that makes even the most tedious contemporary political commentator appear comparatively restrained.

It is not a pleasant read, nor should it be mistaken for an intellectually respectable political programme. Its historical significance lies in revealing the ideas and prejudices that helped justify persecution, dictatorship, aggressive warfare and ultimately genocide.

Yet that makes surviving contemporary editions important historical objects. A 1938 printing offers a tangible connection to the period when Hitler was not yet a defeated dictator consigned to history books, but the leader of a powerful European state whose ambitions would soon plunge the continent into disaster.

There is also a grim irony in the book’s title. Hitler’s supposed personal struggle ultimately became a catastrophe inflicted upon millions of other people, most of whom had neither requested nor deserved any involvement in his ideological obsessions.

Condition: Good. This is a previously owned 1938 Hurst and Blackett edition, offered in Good condition. As a historical publication approaching ninety years of age, it is of potential interest to collectors of pre-war political literature, researchers into fascism, and students of twentieth-century European history.

It has no ISBN, unsurprisingly, having appeared decades before international book numbering became standard.

Available from Crappy Old Books, where books are sold for their historical, cultural and bibliographical interest, not because their authors deserve admiration.

An unsettling but historically significant publication from one of Europe’s darkest political periods.

And a reminder that sometimes the most important books to preserve are those that demonstrate just how disastrously wrong human beings can be.

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