Review of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

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Review of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

$16.99

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Orwell on Hitler

In March 1940, George Orwell reviewed the unexpurgated English translation of Mein Kampf for the New English Weekly. The review runs only a few pages, but it contains one of the most quoted paragraphs in twentieth-century political criticism: Orwell's observation that Hitler's power came not from offering people a good time but from offering them struggle, danger, and death, and that this appeal to sacrifice was something the liberal democracies could not match because they had nothing to offer but safety and comfort.

What This Edition Contains

This Eris Press pamphlet expands on Orwell's original review with additional contemporary essays that place it in context. The result is a short, inexpensive volume that pairs well with Mein Kampf itself or with any serious study of how intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s understood the rise of fascism. Orwell wrote the review while the outcome of the war was still uncertain, and his honesty about the psychological appeal of totalitarian movements remains unsettling.

Why Read It

Orwell was one of the few writers of his generation willing to take fascism seriously as a psychological phenomenon rather than dismissing it as mere thuggery or madness. This short text shows Orwell at his most perceptive. It is also a model of how to write a book review that says more in three pages than most books say in three hundred.