(LONG POST. PART 1/2)

The famous rhetorician Kenneth Burke wrote an influential review of Mein Kampf analyzing Hitler's unique rhetoric (a.k.a. methods of persuasion). It was published in 1939 under the title "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle."

Mein Kampf only became available in unabridged form to America audiences in February 1939. It had been published years earlier in abridged form, but reviews at the time largely dismissed those versions as weak imitations of the actual book (u/The_Alaskan has written an excellent post below detailing those reviews and other early responses. Be sure to check it out). Burke first published his essay in July 1939. Of course, it was not until that September, when Germany invaded Poland, that the European front of World War II developed. So, for all intents and purposes, despite being released fourteen years after the original German publication of Mein Kampf, Burke's response was about as contemporary as English-language responses could be, while also being published before the full and official advent of World War II.

Before I get into the specifics of Burke's essay, first, a bit on rhetoric, and the way Burke handled rhetoric in particular. Clasically, rhetoric is defined as the study of persuasion. Classical rhetoricians such as Aristotle discussed ways that a rhetor (speaker or persuader) could sway the opinions of an audience, including appeals to logic, appeals to emotion, and appeals to one's character. Burke is a pivotal figure in the field of rhetoric, because his work emphasized the importance of identity to argumentation. While it is obviously still important to consider how one persuades an audience, Burke argued it was of equal, if not greater importance to consider how argumentation constructed a group identity. This is all a really reductive overview of Burke and rhetoric in general, but it should be enough to understand the most important stuff about "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle."

Okay, enough preambling. Let's get to it. Burke's essay offers up a fascinating analysis of Nazi rhetoric. It's pretty dense (this is Burke we're talking about after all), and touches upon a wealth of topics deserving a post of their own by a rhetorician/historian much more trained than I - including Burke's comments on Nazi "folkishness," and his claims of the at-times Freudian nature of Hitler's argumentation. Regardless, there are some key things in his essay which are pretty easy to understand, and which give us some insight into how Burke and his contemporaries understood Mein Kampf

About halfway through his essay Burke lists four essential unifying characteristics of Hitler's rhetoric - i.e., elements of it that let him bring together disparate political sentiments: inborn dignity, projection, symbolic rebirth, and commerical use.

Inborn dignity was the idea that Aryans had an essential dignity due to their blood. Here's Burke:

(1) Inborn dignity. In both religious and humanistic patterns of thought, a "natural born" dignity of man is stressed. And this categorical dignity is considered to be an attribute of all men, if they will but avail themselves of it, by right thinking and right living. But Hitler gives this ennobling attitude an ominous twist by his theories of race and nation, whereby the "Aryan" is elevated above all others by the innate endowment of his blood, while other "races," in particular Jews and Negroes, are innately inferior. This sinister secularized revision of Christian theology thus puts the sense of dignity upon a fighting basis, requiring the conquest of "inferior races." After the defeat of Germany in the World War, there were especially strong emotional needs that this compensatory doctrine of an inborn superiority could gratify.

Essentially, inborn dignity meant that Aryans could feel a sense of pride about being Aryan, despite however many economic humiliations they may have suffered. The fact that this nobility was granted for free, Burke notes, is especially important, because it meant those Hitler identified as Aryans could have pride about something. Of course, this was rascist pride.

Hitlers' Projection device was the Jews. Here's more Burke:

(2) Projection device. The "curative" process that comes with the ability to hand over one's ills to a scapegoat, thereby getting purification by dissociation. This was especially medicinal, since the sense of frustration leads to a self questioning. Hence if one can hand over his infirmities to a vessel, or "cause," outside the self, one can battle an external enemy instead of battling an enemy within. And the greater one's internal inadequacies, the greater amount of evils one can load upon the back of "the enemy." This device is furthermore given a semblance of reason because the individual properly realizes that he is not alone responsible for his condition. There are inimical factors in the scene itself. And he wants to have them "placed," preferably in a way that would require minimum change in the ways of thinking to which he had been accustomed. This was especially appealing to the middle class, who were encouraged to feel that they could conduct their businesses without any basic change whatever, once the businessmen of a different "race" were eliminated.

Burke argues here that Hitler used the Jews as a scapegoat for Germany's ills, allowing his followers to turn their own self-resentment and shame outward, projecting them upon an external enemy. Of course, an external enemy is easier to fight (and to hate) that an internal one.

Symbolic Rebirth was the natural outcome of the previous two ideas, when put together. Burke:

(3) Symbolic rebirth. Another aspect of the two features already noted. The projective device of the scapegoat, coupled with the Hitlerite doctrine of inborn racial superiority, provides its followers with a "positive" view of life. They can again get the feel of moving forward, towards a goal (a promissory feature of which Hitler makes much). In Hitler, as the group's prophet, such rebirth involved a symbolic change of lineage. Here, above all, we see Hitler giving a malign twist to a benign aspect of Christian thought. For whereas the Pope, in the familistic pattern of thought basic to the Church, stated that the Hebrew prophets were the spiritual ancestors of Christianity, Hitler uses this same mode of thinking in reverse. He renounces this "ancestry" in a "materialistic" way by voting himself and the members of his lodge a different "bloodstream" from that of the Jews.

Since Hitler's rhetoric proposed a solution to seemingly unsolvable problems (German economic depression), it provided a type of "rebirth" to his followers, a way forward in the world, and out of their current misery. Burke also notes, as I'll discuss later, how this idea draws upon and mutates fundamentally religious thought patterns.

Last, Burke sums up the practicality of these techniques by pointing to Hitler's commercial use.

(4) Commercial use. Hitler obviously here had something to sell—and it was but a question of time until he sold it (i.e., got financial backers for his movement). For it provided a noneconomic interpretation of economic ills. As such, it served with maximum efficiency in deflecting the attention from the economic factors involved in modern conflict; hence by attacking "Jew finance" instead of finance, it could stimulate an enthusiastic movement that left "Aryan" finance in control. Never once, throughout his book, does Hitler deviate from such a formula. Invariably, he ends his diatribes against contemporary economic ills by a shift into an insistence that we must get to the "true" cause, which is centered in "race." The "Aryan" is "constructive"; the Jew is "destructive"; and the"Aryan," to continue his construction, must destroy the Jewish destruction. The Aryan, as the vessel of love, must hate the Jewish hate.

Here, Burke provides one of his central theses - that Hitler's rhetoric provided a "noneconomic interpretation of economic ills." Arguing in this way gave him something to sell to his people - a product that they could buy in to which would solve their problems.

(see first reply for rest of post)

Yes, there were.

Since this is an English-speaking website, let's discuss the first authorized American translation of Mein Kampf, which was published starting in October 1933 by Houghton Mifflin as My Battle. It cost $3.

In the Books of the Times column in the New York Times, reviewer John Chamberlain wrote that "As a book, even with the excessive cutting which the translator, E.T.S. Dugdale, or some one else, has done, "My Battle" is turgid and intensely soporific. But it has flashes of shrewdness."

Chamberlain's lede paragraph is fascinating in that it compares Hitler to Winston Churchill as a politician playing at author ─ this at a time when Churchill was certainly in the British political wilderness. Chamberlain goes on to explain that the American edition is awfully dull but "should be ready by every one seeking to know the psychological make-up of the 'Aryan' leader. He goes on to explain that there are much better books analyzing fascism out there, and a reader would be better off tackling those.

It's interesting to contrast the Times review of My Battle with its review of Germany Enters the Third Reich, which was published a month before and was considered "a balanced an thoroughgoing study of the Third Reich."

Unauthorized translations of Hitler's book had been in circulation before Houghton Mifflin requested the rights from Hitler. The London Times' treatment of the book was noteworthy in that it published its own translated extracts and was criticized for publishing a refined and "Oxfordized" version of Hitler's language that furthered the propaganda value of Hitler's book.

The British version of the book, published at the same time as the American version, was excoriated in its Oct. 13, 1933 Manchester Guardian review by historian R.T. Clark "as a successful effort to 'bowdlerize' and 'whitewash' the original text," C. Caspar indicates in the 1958 paper "'Mein Kampf': A Best Seller" in Jewish Social Studies.

Correspondent Robert Dell, of the Guardian, wrote in his 1934 book Germany Unmasked that it was "difficult to avoid the conclusion that the publication of this translation was an attempt on the part of Hitler and the German Ministry of Propaganda to dupe the English-speaking public" for it could be "no mere coincidence that all, or nearly all, the passages likely to make a bad impression on the English-speaking public and, in particular, all the passages showing Hitler's hatred of France, were omitted."

Houghton-Mifflin was excoriated even more on those same grounds. The American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune wrote in August 1933, "We charge these publishers with an attempt to cash in on the misery and catastrophe of an important section of the human family. We accuse them of abbetting Hitler propaganda in this country, which is even know secretly seeking a fund of $5,000,000 for publicity purposes, in its effort to gain a legitimate foothold in America."

Of course, the Jewish Tribune was absolutely correct. Mein Kampf is almost entirely a work of fiction and propaganda, and its historical references and statements of "fact" bear no resemblance to reality. Thomas Weber's Hitler's First War in particular does a wonderful job of debunking sections of the book related to Hitler's military service and the claim that Hitler (and much of Germany) was radicalized by the war. Since this is the centenary of the First World War, I'd encourage you to pick it up.

There were of course some who failed to see the context of the publication as Dell did. The Times, which had published its own excerpts, was mild in its criticism, saying on July 20, 1933 that "some of Herr Hitler's historical conclusions" were "extremely ill-digested generalizations of a pseudo-scientific kind."

The Daily Telegraph's E.C. Bentley wrote on Oct. 13, 1933 that the book was "marked by an appalling sincerity" which was "one of the secrets of Herr Hitler's success and the most respectable one."

The Anglo-German Review, a mouthpiece for British-Nazi cooperation, said in 1937 that the book was "really quite innocuous ... a work of amazing moderation."

Despite the furor over the first authorized English translation, the Streisand Effect doesn't seem to have taken hold in the United States. According to the 1958 paper, the Dugdale translation sold only 4,633 copies in 1933, then fewer than 1,000 each year until 1937, when sales rose to 1,723. In 1938, they reached 6,500. After war broke out, sales skyrocketed. More than 100,000 copies were sold, and demand generated competing translations.

A hungry American public demanded an unabridged and literal translation. The first came in 1939, translated by a refugee German Social Democrat who worked for the New York Post. Two others also came in 1939, one by Stackpole & Sons and the other by Houghton-Mifflin.

This Houghton-Mifflin version, at just over 1,000 pages, was the much more serious edition, as it was a free translation created by an editorial committee including several prominent scholars and authors. In their preface, they explained that the 1933 abridgement was probably adequate, as "in 1933 it seemed unlikely that any large American public would care to read Mein Kampf as a whole," but now "the book has assumed a more urgent character."

As a fascinating coda, Houghton-Mifflin sued Stackpole & Sons for its unauthorized version of the translation. The case went to U.S. District Court, where a judge ruled that Houghton-Mifflin had correctly obtained the copyright from Hitler. Both companies then pledged that all proceeds from sales of the book "would be used for the benefit of refugees from Nazi oppression."

Curious why you've written "review" in quotes and asked for "legitimate" reviews? What about Orwell's review makes in not legitimate in your eyes?