YMMV / Mein Kampf

• Broken Base: Regarding the newer edition commentary. Some say it veers into Viewers Are Morons territory; others believe it is necessary, especially to keep from losing context on the era and situation of the time.
• First Installment Wins: Mein Kampf is way better known than its sequel Zweites Buch, but that's because the latter did not get published during Hitler's lifetime, while the former became a bestseller when Hitler came to power and everyone wanted to know what he thought. After the war many Germans said things to the effect of "Of course we owned a copy — you could hardly avoid that. But I never actually read that dreck". Whether that is true in either the individual case or the aggregate (the book has been called the "most widely unread bestseller of the modern era") is now impossible to verify or falsify, given that most of the people in question are long dead.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Mein Kampf has a following in Saudi Arabia and India, as well as other countries with high rates of antisemitism.
• Harsher in Hindsight: To a reader in the 1920s (even other fascists like Benito Mussolini), the book would come off as the hilarious ramblings of a madman. Today, it's a grim historical document, especially with his hostile tirades against Jews.
• Misaimed Fandom: It's not surprising that antisemites love this book. It is somewhat more surprising that antisemites who belong to other groups of people Hitler hated would. Summing up Hitler's writing in The Infernal Library, a book about books by dictators, author Daniel Kalder observes that "Such is the book's power that its readers overlook the obvious implications for their races and extract from it what they want."
• Narm Charm: In a really, really dark way, Hitler's teachings are maniacal and incoherent...but many readers find the harsh and furious manner he used to describe them attractive.
• Nightmare Fuel: Underneath the poor writing, one can find the mindset of a man who would kill millions of people because of their ethnicity. Quite a few statements can chill the bones of those who read it.
  If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas, such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.
• Values Dissonance: It's hardly surprising that a prominent work written by Adolf Hitler, espousing his ideas and containing many prejudices that are not only outdated but extreme even for the time, would be this for modern-day people.
• Wangst: Hitler spends the entire book complaining about the world; it ends up reading like a whiny MySpace page. However, George Orwell thought this was why Mein Kampf appealed to so many people.
  George Orwell: The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

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