How to Read: Hitler

Granta's new How to Read series is based on a very simple, but novel, idea. Most beginners' guides to great thinkers and writers offer either potted biographies or condensed summaries of their major works. How to Read, by contrast, brings the reader face to face with the writing itself in the company of an expert guide. Its starting point is that in order to get close to what a writer is all about, you have to get close to the words they actually use and be shown how to read those words. Each book in the series will hopefully be a masterclass in reading. Our authors have been asked to select ten or so short extracts from a writer's work and look at them in detail as a way of revealing their central ideas and thereby opening the doors onto a whole world of thought. The books will not be merely a compilation of a thinker's most famous passages, their 'greatest hits', but will rather offer a series of clues or keys that will enable to reader to go on and make discoveries of their own. In addition to the texts and readings, each book will provide a short biographical chronology and suggestions for further reading, internet resources and so on.
The books in the How to Read don't claim to tell you all you need to know. Instead they offer a refreshing set of first-hand meetings with those minds. Our hope is that these books will instruct, intrigue, embolden, encourage and delight. Neil Gregor introduces the reader to the crude but clear system of thought of the most notorious anti-Semite in history. He shows that for all Hitler's inadequacies as a writer, his texts do convey an implicitly genocidal message - if they do not necessarily announce mass murder as a stated ambition, they certainly contain it as a strong logical possibility. Analysing the text as a literary as well as a political tract, Neil Gregor shows, in particular, how the radical nationalist and racist messages of Hitler's best known work, Mein Kampf, are contained not just in the author's own arguments but in the language and generic forms of the book itself. Extracts are taken from Mein Kampf and from the Second Book.