How to Read Hitler

How to Read Hitler, by Neil Gregor (London: Granta, 2005; pp. 119. Pb. £6.99). This volume helps to launch a new series of ‘beginners’ guides to great thinkers and writers'. While the publisher's decision to apply such a label to Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein may well seem unremarkable, the inclusion of Hitler in the initial roster is plainly more controversial. The choice can be justified only by endorsing the kind of assessment best encapsulated in Donald Watt's comment about the Führer's possession of ‘a second-rate mind of immense power’. That is broadly the spirit in which Neil Gregor has tackled the challenge of demonstrating why Hitler's singularly tedious prose remains worthy of critical engagement, as an aid to understanding the nature and popular reception of his crude but hugely influential ideas. The resulting ‘masterclass in reading’ (as the series editor puts it) is unlikely to appeal to any

Appeal · Art · Art history · Linguistics · Political science · Possession (linguistics · Power (physics · Reading (process · Watt · History · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics