Karl Ove Knausgaard goes through a lengthy review of Hitler's life in the sixth and final volume of his "My Struggle" series. One of his written reasons for writing the series was as a reaction to the elimination of individuality he perceived in Nazi propaganda. He wanted to express his own individuality. He also seems to want to humanize and individualize Adolf Hitler, again to put an "I" where the Nazis described a "We." Knausgaard's discussion is primarily based on the text of Mein Kampf and writings by Kershaw and Kubizek. At least so far - I'm not done reading it yet.
Are Knausgaard's thoughts based on an accurate portrait of Hitler's life? Are his sources sufficiently reliable or complete for the presented facts to be accepted at face value?
Hi there,
On /r/AskHistorians we often get questions along the lines of 'what did Hitler think about X' - I mean, as an April Fools joke one year, we changed the sub to /r/AskAboutHitler. However, for better or worse, many of these questions about what Hitler thought are, in the literal sense, unanswerable. We don't know what Hitler thought about many things, and especially about things which were inconsequential for him. Hitler did not keep a diary, and the collections of his private conversations is disjointed and nowhere near complete, being almost completely dependent on the post-war recollection of his intimates (who may also be unreliable in their recollections, especially given those circumstances).
Of course, you may still get an answer to this particular question! However, broadly speaking, proving the negative is very hard (there could be an 1965 article on the topic in Swahili), and if you've asked a question which is almost certainly "We don't know, and he probably didn't care anyways", few historians familiar with the topic matter actually are going to want to put in the necessary gruntwork, doubly so about a man who on a personal level was decidedly uninteresting.
For more information that will be helpful in understanding the context around your question, please read /u/commiespaceinvader's wonderful post on why Hitler's opinions actually aren't that interesting, and please see here for an example of a historian attempting to find evidence about Hitler's thoughts on a topic, but finding that it is likely unanswerable.