A review by ayla_derammelaere
Mijn strijd. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0



I started reading this book because I wanted to try and understand what (type of) man Hitler was. I was curious to see if there was anything that had happened to him, to trigger all the horrible things he has done and were done in his name.

The book turned out to be one of the books that made me stop reading and think about it, more than any other book. So many things that he said, make sense. It's clear he was a very intelligent man who knew a lot about psychology and was able to lead an entire people into one mass psychoses.

I am definitly not someone who likes his ideas, don't get me wrong, but a lot of what he said about politics, about advertisement, about what a government should do and what is important to inhabitants of a country, makes a lot of sense.
Besides those ideas, he displays a lot of hate towards Jews and believers in Marx (at a certain point, these 2 groups of people, become one and the same in his eyes).

The thing that made me feel the saddest, was to realize that Hitler actually wasn't planning on killing the Jews : his idea was to ship them off to Russia. And only when he realized that he couldn't conquer Russia, he decided to kill all of them.. I still don't understand how someone can go from a 'benign solution' of a problem, to a mass murder with nothing in between.

I never understood why a book should be banned and I still think it's better to explain than to ban. But I do understand why people were afraid of youngsters reading this book. If even for a second, you forget what his ideas have caused, you might start to feel sympathy. In that way, his reading reminded me a bit of Julius Caesar (de bello Gallico) and Hendrik Conscience (de leeuw van Vlaanderen).