In 1925 – the very year the High Bouncing Love appeared as the Great Gatsby – another best-selling, era-defining book was published, having been renamed by an editor with an eye for such things. The book was called Mein Kampf.
Max Amann, the editor in question, had been Hitler’s company sergeant in World War I. Later, he had the publishing gumption to discern that the author’s working title wasn’t really a goer – Hitler having called his opus Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice.
Now, Mein Kampf is a canny title, evoking a certain grandeur; implying the story of terrible odds being overcome, the exertions of a self-created Superman.
By way of contrast, Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice sounds like a book scribbled on toilet paper by the madman who sits next to you on the bus….accurately signalling not only the narrative’s lunatic malignancy but its fervid anti-style — its incessant, mind-boggling, monomaniacal ranting.
Mein Kampf is so manifestly a product of its author’s pathology, the experience of reading is weirdly tedious. It’s a difficult book even to hate. To read it, or to try (I never got past more than twenty pages) is simply to come away baffled and depressed; not by the views expressed, which any halfwit could see were demented, but that people appear to have read this stuff in their droves….even before circumstance meant they kind of had to.
Mein Kampf sold well enough for Hitler to buy himself a decent Merc while he was still in prison. It made him rich before it helped make him Chancellor in 1933.
The nature of historical causality is a monstrously complex and disputatious subject on which I have many opinions but no expertise — but still, I can’t help but wonder to what degree things might have been different, had Hitler had a less astute and (one presumes) forthright literary editor.
