/lit/ - Literature

Overrated trash, but every country that bans it is a thoughtcrime opressive shithole. I'd rather be poor and free.

>>19335816
This thread is le bad, kill yourself OP

>>19335847
>OP is... LE FAGGOT

>>19335816
Yes.

>>19335840
is it banned anywhere?

>bad guy is named "hitler"
Goddamn what a cliche piece of shit this book was. I'm glad I burned it.

>>19335896
He's like err like literally Hitler

>>19335896
kek

OP is a faggot, and has never read it.

Yep

>>19335840
> I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Yikes anon. Would they do the same for you?

>"Instead of answering, he handed me a couple of hastily scribbled sheets. [...] I could not see any connection between this extraordinary description and the study of architecture, so I asked what it was supposed to be. 'A play,' replied Adolf. Then, in stirring words, he described the action to me. Unfortunately, I have long since forgotten it. I remember only that it was set in the Bavarian mountains at the time of the bringing of Christianity to those parts. I would have liked to have asked Adolf whether his studies in the Academy left him so much free time that he could write dramas, too, but I knew how sensitive he was about everything pertaining to his chosen profession"
p.158

>As the only son of a self-employed upholsterer, August was expected to someday take over his father's business, but he secretly harboured dreams of becoming a conductor. With Adolf's encouragement, he devoted more and more of his time to this passion, completing all the musical training available to him in Linz. However, to achieve his goal, he would require higher education in music which was offered only in Vienna.

>It was Adolf Hitler who, at the age of eighteen, successfully persuaded Kubizek's father to let his son go to the metropolis to attend the conservatory. This, Kubizek wrote, changed the course of his life for good.

>"At the beginning of February, Adolf returned to Vienna. His address remained the same, he told me when he left [...] I helped him carry his luggage to the station, four cases altogether unless I mistaken, every one of them very heavy. I asked him what they contained, and he answered 'all of my belongings'. They were almost entirely books."
p.147

>"His classmates, mostly from solid, good-class Linz families, cold-shouldered the strange boy who arrived daily 'from amongst the peasants'"
p.59

>"In class he rarely came to anybody's notice. He had no friends, contrary to primary school, and wanted none"
p.59

>"He too, was completely alone. His father had been dead for two years. However much he loved his mother, she could not help him with his problems. He just needed to talk and needed someone who would listen to him."
p.32

>"Adolf set great store by good manners and correct behaviour. He observed with painstaking punctiliousness the rules of social conduct, however little he thought of society itself"
p.38

>"People who knew him in Vienna could not understand the contradiction between his well-groomed appearance, his educated speech and his self-assured bearing on the one hand, and the starveling existence that he led on the other, and judged him either haughty or pretentious. He was neither. He just did not fit into any bourgeois order"
p.38

>>19336653
>"He wallowed deeper and deeper in self-criticism. Yet it only needed the lightest touch - as when one flicks on the light and everything becomes brilliantly clear - for his self-accusation to become an accusation against the times, against the whole world. Choking with his catalogue of hates, he would pour his fury over everything, against mankind in general who did not understand him, who did not appreciate him and by whom he was persecuted"
p.158 / 159

>"There was a strange contradiction which always struck me: all his thoughts and ambitions were directed towards the problem of how to help the masses, the simple, the decent but under-priveleged people with whom he identified himself - they were ever-present in his thoughts - but in actual fact he always avoided any contact with people"
p.164

>"I was surprised he had so much spare time and asked innocently whether he had a job. 'Of course not', was his gruff reply [...] He did not consider that any particular work [...] was necessary for him"
p.29/30

>"Many other qualities which are characteristic of youth were lacking in him: a carefree letting go of himself, living only for the day, the happy attitude of 'what is to be, will be'. His idea was that these were things that did not become a young man"
p.43

>"He had no comprehension of enjoyment of life as others knew it. He did not smoke, he did not drink, and in Vienna, for instance, he lives for days on milk and bread only"
p.39

>"When we passed by the Cafe Baumgartner he would get wildly worked up about the young men who were exhibiting themselves at marble-topped tables behind the big window panes and wasting their time in idle gossip, without apparently realizing how much this indignation was contradicted by his own way of life"
p.30

>"Although he always felt a sense of responsibility for everything that happened, he was always a lonely and solitary man, determined to reply upon himself, and so to reach his goal"
p.165

>"But he? Where should he have gone that Christmas Eve? He had no acquaintances, no friends, nobody who would have received him with open arms. For him the world was hostile and empty. [...] All he ever told me of that Christmas Eve was that he had wandered around for hours. Only towards morning had he returned home and gone to sleep. What he thought, felt and suffered I never knew"
p.140

>"'Gustle', she said - usually she called me Herr Kubizek, but in that hour she used the name by which Adolf always called me - 'go on being a good friend to my son when I'm no longer here. He has no one else'. With tears in my eyes I promised, and then I went"
p.137

>"He no longer attended school; did nothing to get himself job training; lived with his mother and let her keep him. But he was not idle: this period of his life was filled with restless activity. He sketched, he painted, he wrote poetry, he read"
p.62

>>19336657
>"At Linz, Hitler made neither a good not a bad impression on me. He was also not a leader in class. He was slim and upright, his face mostly pale and gaunt, and there was almost a consumptive look about him, his gaze enormously open, his eye luminous"
p.64

>"In this emotional conflict, Adolf Hitler proved a reliable friend. He had put backbone into my idea of choosing music as my profession, and was very clever at how he went about making it possible. For the first and only time I discovered in him a quality of which I was unaware and which I never experienced in him later: patience."
p.79

>"In conflict with a bourgeois world, which with its deceit and false rectitude had nothing to offer him, he sought instinctively his own world and found it in the origins and early history of his own peoples"
p.83

>These ones are about a girl named Stefanie. Hitler and his friend (the author) would turn up at the river in Linz at 5pm each day to watch her and her mother walk past on their daily stroll.

>"I found out that Stefanie's mother was a widow and did, indeed, live in Urharr, and that the young man who occasionally accompanied them, to Adolf's great irritation, was her brother. But from time to time the two ladies were to be seen in the company of young officers. Poor, pallid youngsters like Hitler naturally could not hope to compete with these young lieutenants in their smart uniforms. Adolf felt this intensely and gave vent to his feelings with eloquence. His anger, in the end, led him into uncompromising enmity towards the officer class as a whole, and everything military in general"
p.67

>"To be sure, Stefanie had no idea how deeply Adolf was in love with her; she regarded him as a somewhat shy but, nevertheless, remarkably tenacious and faithful admirer. When she responded with a smile to his enquiring glance, he was happy and his mood became unlike anything I had ever observed in him [...] But when Stefanie, as happened just as often, coldly ignored his gaze, he was crushed and ready to destroy himself and the whole world"
p.67

>"I thought, for a long time, that Adolf was simply too shy to approach Stefanie. And yet, it was not shyness that held him back. His conception of the relationship between the sexes was already then so high that the usual way of making the acquaintance of a girl seemed to him undignified. As he was opposed to flirting in any form, he was convinced that Stefanie had no other desire but to wait until he should come to ask her to marry him. I did not share this conviction at all, but Adolf, as was his habit with all problems that agitated him, had already made an elaborate plan"
p.69

>"And this girl, who was a stranger to him and had never exchanged a word with him, succeeded where his father, the school and even his mother had failed: he drew up and exact programme for his future which would enable him, after four years, to ask for Stefanie's hand. We discussed this difficult problem for hours, with the result that Adolf commissioned me to collect further information about Stefanie"
p.69

>"'Stefanie is fond of dancing. If you want to conquer her, you will have to dance around just as aimlessly and idiotically as the others.' That was all that was needed to set him off raving. 'No, no, never!' he screamed at me, 'I shall never dance! Do you understand! Stefanie only dances because she is forced to by society on which she unfortunately depends. Once she is my wife, she won't have the slightest desire to dance!'"
p.71

>"As with everything that he couldn't tackle at once, he indulged in generalisations. 'Visualise a crowded ballroom', he said once to me, 'and imagine that you are deaf. You can't hear the music to which these people are moving, and then take a look at their senseless progress, which leads nowhere. Aren't these people raving mad?'"
p.70

>"One day when I interrupted the bold flow of his ideas for the national monument and asked him soberly how he proposed to finance this project, his first reply was a brusque, 'Oh, to hell with the money!' But apparently my query had disturbed him. And he did what other people do who want to get rich quickly - he bought a lottery ticket. [...] Adolf was sure he had won from the moment of buying the ticket and had only forgotten to collect the money. His only possible worry was how to spend this not inconsiderable sum to the best of his advantage"
p.111

>"The day of the [lottery] draw arrived. Adolf came rushing wildly round to the workshop with the list of results. I have rarely heard him rage so madly as then. First he fumed over the state lottery, this officially organised exploitation of human credulity, this open fraud at the expense of docile citizens. Then his fury turned to the state itself, this patchwork of ten or twelve, or God knows how many nations, this monster built up by Habsburg marriages. Could one expect other than two impoverished devils should be cheated out of their last couple of crowns? Never did it occur to Adolf to reproach himself for having taken it for granted that the first prize belonged to him by right"
p.114

>"he was anxious to escape the atmosphere that prevailed at home. The idea that he, a young man of eighteen, should continue to be kept by his mother had become unbearable to him. On the one hand, he loved his mother above everything: she was the only person on earth to whom he felt really close, and she reciprocated his feeling to some extent, although she was deeply disturbed by her son's unusual nature, however proud she was at times of him. 'He is different from us,' she used to say"
p.124

>>19336665
>"At long last the great moment arrived. Adolf, beaming with delight, came to see me at the workshop, where we were very busy at that time. 'I'm leaving tomorrow,' he said briefly. He asked me to accompany him to the station, as he did not want his mother to come. I knew how painful it would have been for Adolf to take leave of his mother in front of other people. He disliked nothing more than showing his feelings in public"
p.127

>"His mother was crying and little Paula, whom Adolf had never bothered with much, was sobbing in a heart-rending manner. When Adolf caught up with me on the stairs and helped me with the suitcase, I saw that his eyes too were wet"
p.127

On his poverty and his attitude towards the rich
>"When we went with empty stomachs into the centre of the city, we saw the splendid mansions of the nobility with garishly attired servants in front, and the sumptuous hotels in which Vienna's rich society - the old nobility; the captains of industry, landowners and magnates - held their lavish parties: poverty, need, hunger on the one side, and reckless enjoyment of life, sensuality and prodigal luxury on the other"
p.163

>"At all costs, he would keep his linen and clothing clean. No one, meeting this carefully dressed young man in the street would have thought that he went hungry every day, and lived in a hopelessly bug-infested back room in the 6th District"
p.163

On his lack of confidence in regards to Stefanie

>"With his memory of his first day in Vienna transfigured by his yearning for Stefanie, Adolf entered the critical summer of 1907. What he suffered in those weeks was in many respects similar to the grave crisis of two years earlier when, after much heart-searching, he had finally settled his accounts with the school and made an end of it. Outwardly, this seeking for a new path showed itself in dangerous fits of depression. I knew only too well those moods of his, which were in sharp contrast to his ecstatic dedication and activity, and realised that I could no help him. At such times he was inacessible, uncommunicative and distant. [...] Adolf would wander around alone for days and nights in the fields and forests surrounding the town"
p.123

>"Stefanie had probable long since become bored by the silent, but strictly conventional adulation of the pale, thin youth, my friend lost himself increasingly in his wishful dreams the more he saw her. Yet he was past those romantic ideas of elopement or suicide"
p.123

>"Adolf, perhaps, already realised that, if he wanted to win Stefanie, he would have to speak to her or take some such decisive step. Nevertheless he felt instinctively that it would abruptly destroy his life's dream if he actually made Stefanie's acquaintance. Indeed, as he said to me, 'If I introduce myself to Stefanie and her mother, I will have to tell her at once what I am, what I have and what I want. My statement would bring our relations abruptly to an end'"
p.124

>>19335816
>>19335830

>>19336676
>"One day he ranted at me: 'Now I am going to see if music is the witchcraft you always say it is!' and with these words he announced his decision to learn the piano, convinced that in no time at all he would have mastered it. [...] Here Adolf fell into a dilemma. He was far too proud simply to give up on an attempt by which he had set such store, but this stupid 'exercising the fingers' left him raging"
p.78

>"All the same, Adolf recognized my musical talent without the least envy, and rejoiced or suffered with me in my successes or setbacks as if they were applicable to himself. I found him very supporting and the great strength behind my ambition"
p.78

>"He finally reconciled himself to the piano [that August had installed in the boys' shared room]. He could practise a but too, he remarked. I said I was willing to teach him - but here again I had put my foot in it. In ill-temper he snarled at me, 'You can keep your scales and such rubbish, I'll get on by myself'. Then he calmed down again and said, in a conciliatory tone, 'Why should I become a musician, Gustl? After all, I have you!'"
p.154

On Adolf being flirted with while helping his friend to find a room to rent
>"Once more we saw a notice 'room to let'. We rang the bell and the door was opened by a neatly dressed maid who showed us into an elegantly furnished room containing magnificent twin beds. 'Madame is coming immediately,' said the maid, curtsied and vanished. We both knew at once that it was too stylish for us. Then 'madame' appeared in a doorway, very much a lady, not so young, but very elegant. She wore a silk dressing gown and slippers trimmed with fur. She greeted us smilingly, inspected Adolf, then me, and asked us to sit down. [...] The lady was obviously disappointed that it was I and not Adolf who wanted a room, and asked whether Adolf already had lodgings. [...] While she was suggesting this to Adolf with some animation, through a sudden movement the belt which kept the dressing gown together came undone. 'Oh, excuse me gentlemen,' the lady exclaimed, and immediately refastened the dressing gown. But that second had sufficed to show us that under her silk covering she wore nothing but a brief pair of knickers. Adolf turned red as a peony, gripped my arm and said, 'Come Gustl!'. I do not remember how we got out of the house. All I remember is Adolf's furious exclamation as we arrived back in the street. 'What a Frau Potiphar!'. Apparently such experiences were also part of Vienna."
p.153

>>19335895
Of course!
Until just recently it was even banned in Germany. Now it can be purchased but it has to be accompanied with a critical text explaining why it’s bad.

>>19336691
>"However much he avoided close contact with people, he had nevertheless grown fond of Vienna as a city; he could have lived quite happily without the people, but never without the city. Small wonder than that the few people whom he later came to know in Vienna thought of him as a lone wolf and eccentric, and regarded as pretence or arrogance his refined speech, his distinguished manners and elegant bearing, which belied his obvious poverty. In fact, the young Hitler made no friends in Vienna"
p.165

>"I did not know what this present mood of deep depression was due to, but I thought that sooner or later it would improve. He was at odds with the world. Wherever he looked, he saw injustice, hate and enmity. Nothing was free from his criticism, nothing found favour in his eyes. Only music was able to cheer him up a little as, for instance, when we went on Sundays to the performances of sacred music in the Burgkapelle."
p.157

>"All this time he was ceaselessly busy. I had no idea what a student at the Academy of Arts was supposed to do - in any case, the subjects must be exceedingly varied. One day he would be sitting for hours over books, then again he would sit writing till the small hours [...]"

>"But in money matters Adolf was very precise. I never knew how much, or rather, how little, money he had. Doubtless he was secretly ashamed of it. Occasionally the anger got the better of him and he would shout with fury, 'Isn't this a dog's life?'. Nevertheless he was happy and contented when we could go once more to the opera, or listen to a concert, or read an interesting book"
p.155


>"While I was undecided whether to list my friend amongst the great musicians or the great poets of the future, he sprang on me the announcement that he intended to become a painter. [...] The first time I went to visit him at home, his room was littered with sketches, drawings, blueprints"
p.96

>"He had been refused by the academy; he had failed even before he had got a footing in Vienna. But he was too proud to talk about it, and so he concealed from me what had occurred. He concealed it from his mother too. [...] He made no attempt to obtain exceptional treatment or to humiliate himself in front of people who did not understand him. There was neither revolt nor rebellion, instead came a radical withdrawal into himself, an obstinate resolve to cope alone with adversity, an embittered 'now, more than ever!' which he flung at the gentlemen of the Schiller Platz [art school]"
p.130

>>19336697
On Hitler's helping out August's mother
>"A little incident stands out in my memory. Adolf and I had left the inn for a bathe. We were both fairly good swimmers, but my mother, nevertheless, was nervous. She followed us and stood on a protruding rock to watch us. The rock sloped down to the water and was covered with moss. My poor mother, while she was anxiously watching us, slipped on the smooth moss and slid into the water. I was too far away to help her at once, but Adolf immediately jumped in after her and dragged her out. He always remained attached to my parents. As late as 1944, on my mother's 80th birthday, he sent her a food parcel"
p.41

On Adolf's growing political ambitions and his feelings towards the "masses"
>"I would never have believed that these experiences in the suburbs of Vienna would have stirred up his whole personality so enormously, for I had always thought of my friend as basically an artists, and would have understood if he had grown indignant at the sight of the masses who appeared to be hopelessly perishing in their misery, yet remained aloof from all this, so as not to be dragged down into the abyss by the city's inexorable fate. I reckoned with his susceptibility, his aestheticism, his constant fear of physical contact with strangers - he shook hands only rarely and then only with a few people - and I thought this would be sufficient to keep him at a distance from the masses. This was only true of personal contacts, but with his whole overflowing heart he stood then in the ranks of the under-privileged. It was not sympathy in the ordinary sense which he felt for the disinherited. That would not have been sufficient. He not only suffered with them, he lived for them and devoted all his thoughts for the salvation of those people from stress and poverty. No doubt, this ardent desire for a total reorganisation of life was his personal response to his own fate, which had led him, step by step, into misery"
p.173

>>19336705
On Adolf's intention on becoming a writer
>"Adolf wrote a great deal during this period. I had discovered that it was mainly plays, dramas actually. He took the plots from Germanic mythology or German history, but hardly any of these plays were really finished. [...] Adolf showed me some of his drafts, and I was struck by the fact that he attributed much importance to magnificent staging. [...] [I told him] the most profitable thing would be to write some unpretentious comedy. Unpretentious? This was all that was needed to make him furious. So this attempt, too, ended in failure."
p.176-77

>"Gradually I came to realise that all my efforts were wasted. Even if I had managed to persuade Adolf to submit his drawings or his literary work to a newspaper editor or publisher, he would soon have quarrelled with his employer, for he could never tolerate any interference with his work, and it would presumably make no difference that he was getting paid for it. He simply could no bear taking orders from people, for he received enough orders from himself."
p.177

On Adolf's reluctance to fit into the artistic world
>"He never showed any desire to mix with people who shared his own professional interests, or to discuss with them common problems. Rather than meet people with specialised knowledge, he would sit alone on his bench in the Schonbrunn Park, in the vicinity of the Gloriette, holding imaginary conversations with himself about the subject matters of his books."
p.177

On Adolf's love for books
>"So, for my friend it was books, always books. I could not imagine Adolf without books. He stacked them in piles around him. He had to have with him at his side the book he was currently working through. Even if he did not happen to be reading it just then, it had to be around. Whenever he went out, there would usually be a book under his arm. This was often a problem, for he would rather abandon nature and the open sky than the book."
p.179

>"Books were his whole world. In Linz, in order to procure the books he wanted, he had subscribed to three libraries. In Vienna he used the Hof Library so industriously that I asked him once in all seriousness whether he intended to read the whole library, which of course earned me some rude remarks"
p.180

>"Hardly anything would disturb him when he was reading, but sometimes he disturbed himself, for as soon as he opened a book he started talking about it, and I had to listen patiently whether I was interested in the subject or not. Every now and then, in Linz even more frequently than in Vienna, he would thrust a book into my hands and demand that I, as his friend, should read it."
p.180

>"Adolf had an especially feel for poets and authors who had something of value to say to him. He never read books simply to pass the time; it was a deadly earnest occupation. I got that impression more than once. What an upset if I did not take his reading seriously enough and played the piano while he was studying."
p.180

Not sure how people deny the holocaust when in Mein Kampf he makes a big deal about how we should "pull the weeds of society" and just kill people who bring civilization down.

Also Hitler makes it clear that he views overpopulation as a massive threat to society. He pretty much explicitly says "a lot of people need to die to preserve civilization."

>>19336681
But this doesn’t work. Christianity is peak slave morality.

>>19336712
On the authors and works he enjoyed
>"In Linz, Adolf had started to read the classics. Of Goethe's 'Faust' he once remarked that it contained more than the human mind could grasp. [...] It is natural that, of Schiller's works, 'Wilhelm Tell' affected him most deeply. [...] He was profoundly impressed by Dante's 'Divine Comedy' [...] I know that he was interested in Herder, and we saw together Lessing's 'Minna von Barhelm'. He liked Stifter partly I suppose because he encountered in his writing the familiar picture of his native landscape, while Rosegger struck him, as he once put it, as 'too popular'"
p.181

>"Every now and then he would choose books which were then in vogue, but in order to form a judgement of those who read them, rather than of the books themselves. Ganghofer meant nothing to him, whilst he greatly praised Otto Ernst. [...] Adolf read Ibsen's plays in Vienna without being very much impressed by them."
p.181

>"As for philosophical works, he always had his Schopenhauer by him, later Nietzsche too"
p.181

On Adolf's reasons for reading so much
>"He was a seeker, certainly, but even in his books he found only what suited him. [...] I remember him in Vienna expounding his many problems and usually winding up with a reference to some book, 'You see, the man who wrote this is of exactly the same opinion as I am.'"
p.182

On the opera
>"The high spots of our friendship were our visits to the Hof Opera, and memories of my friend are inseparably connected with these wonderful experiences."
p.183

>"Having finally secured the ticket, there started a rush towards the promenade which was fortunately not far from the box office. It was below the imperial box and one could hear excellently. Women were not admitted to the promenade which pleased Adolf hugely, but on the other hand it had the disadvantage of being split up into two halves by a brass railing, one for civilians, one for the military. [...] This always made Adolf very wild. Looking at these elegant lieutenants who, ceaselessly yawning, could hardly wait for the interval to display themselves in the foyer as they had just come out of their box, he said that among the visitors to the promenade artistic understanding varied in inverse proportion to the price of the tickets."
p.184

>"One disadvantage was that the promenade was usually the haunt of the claque, and this often spoilt our pleasure. The usual procedure was very simple: a singer who wanted to be applauded at a certain point would hire a claque for the evening. Its leader would buy their tickets for his men and in addition pay them a sum of money. [...] So it would often happen that at a most unsuitable moment, roars of applause would break out all around us. This made us boil over with indignation. I remember once, during Tannhauser, we silencted a group of claqueurs by our hissing. One of them, who continued to shout 'Bravo!' even though the orchestra was still playing, was punched in the side by Adolf."
p.184

>>19336720
On Adolf's opinion of Italian operas and Wagner
>"For him, the plots of Italian operas lad too much emphasis upon theatrical effect. He objected to trickery, knavery and deception as the basic elements of a dramatic situation. He said to me once, 'What would these Italians do if they had no daggers?'"
p.187

>"When he listened to Wagner's music he was a changed man: his violence left him, he became quiet, yielding and tractable. His gaze lost its restlessness; his own destiny, however heavily it may have weighed upon him, became unimportant. He no longer felt lonely and outlawed, misjudged by society. [...] From the stale, musty prison of his back room, he was transported into the blissful regions of Germanic antiquity, that ideal world which was the lofty goal for all his endeavours."
p.188

More on Adolf's literary ambitions
>"In those weeks, Adolf wrote a lot, mainly plays, but also a few stories. He sat at his table and worked until dawn, without telling me very much about what he was doing. Only now and then would he throw on to my bed some closely written sheets of paper or would read out to me a few pages of his work, written in a strangely exalted style."
p.189

On Adolf's behaviour when writing
>"Oblivious to his surroundings, he never tired, he never slept. He ate nothing, he hardly drank. At the most he would occasionally grab a milk bottle and take a hasty gulp, certainly without being aware of it, for he was too completely wrapped up in his work. Never before had I been so directly impressed by this ecstatic creativeness. Where was it leading him? He squandered his strength and talents on something that had no practical value. How long would his weakened, delicate body stand this overstrain?"
p.194

On the perceived contrasts between Adolf and others his age
>"I knew the normal interests of young people of my age: flirtations, shallow pleasures, idly play and a lot of unimportant, meaningless thoughts. Adolf was the exact opposite. There was an incredible earnestness in him, a thoroughness, a true passionate interest in everything that happened and, most important, an unfailing devotion to the beauty, majesty and grandeur of art"
p.194

>"Thirty years later, when he met met again in Linz, his friend whom he had last seen as a student of the Vienna Conservatoire, he was convinced that I had become an important conductor, but when I appeared before him as a humble municipal employee, Hitler, by then Reich Chancellor, alluded to the possibility of my assuming the direction of an orchestra. I declined with thanks. I no longer felt up to the task. When he realised that he could not help his friend with this generous offer, he recalled our common experiences at the Linz theatre and the Vienna Hof Opera, which had elevated our friendship from the commonplace to the sacred sphere of his own world, and invited me to come to Bayreuth."
p.188

>>19336653
>>19336657
>>19336665
>>19336671
>>19336676
>>19336691
>>19336697
>>19336705
>>19336712
>>19336720
>>19336725

>>19336750
Bonus Mussolini for you.

>Bräuninger recounts a remarkable incident in which Mussolini invited the German – and incidentally Jewish – translator of Dante, Rudolf Borchardt, to a private audience in 1933, and quotes from Rudolf Borchardt’s Besuch bei Mussolini (Visit to Mussolini):

>'I could only be astonished that this man, the ruler of Italy, with all the burdens of the day’s work on his shoulders, found time to discuss with me the precise translation of individual words and expressions . . . He opened the first Canto and began to read. “That is a literal translation,” he remarked, and then said, “I understand it is written in a modern German style. Wait, what is this?” He pointed to a word he did not know, and I had to explain it to him. . . . Concentrated willpower and a positive sort of decisiveness mastered in large part the rounded and complete gestures of the kind one might expect from a dignitary of the Church or an aristocratic poet, reminding me of some pictures of the later Goethe. . . . Schlegel, Schelling, Hegel, King Johann of Saxony, Vossler, George – he made a brief appraisal of each. “Now to the fifth circle of the Inferno,” he exclaimed, adding rapidly and almost merrily, “Francesca da Remini.” . . . He went to the last stanzas, read out my German translation, then recited the original Italian verses from memory, read more German, and compared them exactly with the verses which he knew by heart. He pointed to a subtlety of tone in the Italian original and wanted to be sure that I had successfully reproduced it in German, reading out my German version slowly and carefully, with a strong but accurate pronunciation. Finally, he interrupted his own criticisms and suggestions by excusing himself, adding that he was only a layman and a mere reader. He closed the book, opened it once more, and finally closed it for good. “Thank you,” he said earnestly, and shook my hand warmly.' (p. 163)

>So much for the ignorant dictator! It would be interesting to know how many professors of Italian literature today could today offer an informed critique of a translation of Dante’s Inferno, citing stanzas by heart, let alone how many mere laymen and readers could do so. Bräuninger tells us that Mussolini was an avid reader of the Classics and a keen opera aficionado, something which tends to be ignored in post-war mainstream historical accounts.

>Much else tends to be downplayed as well, which Bräuninger highlights, including the enormous popularity of Mussolini’s economic and social policies.

>>19336695
so it isn’t banned in germany? is it banned anywhere else?