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I think about Hitler a lot. I’m sure someone out there will think that’s awful. I don’t give a fuck. Hitler is an interesting guy to ponder. I mean, that guy was fucked up. His childhood must have been awful.
I wonder what his particular abuse was. I wish I could talk to him. I wish I could get him stoned. I wish I could ask him about little Adolf. Was he a chubby little boy or was he scrawny? Was his father proud of him or disappointed?
I’m sure someone has thought about this. I’m sure a book has been written. I think I might find that book and read it. I want to understand Hitler. I want to understand, just a little bit, what makes a little boy grow into a monster.
Hitler is an interesting guy to me. I don’t know why. Maybe I figure if I can just slightly figure out Hitler, I will finally understand my father.
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Alice Miller (link)
http://www.naturalchild.org/alice_miller/adolf_hitler.html
Quote:
“Yet the monster Adolf Hitler, murderer of millions, master of destruction and organized insanity, did not come into the world as a monster. He was not sent to earth by the devil, as some people think, nor was he sent by heaven to “bring order” to Germany, to give the country the autobahn and rescue it from its economic crisis, as many others still believe. Neither was he born with “destructive drives”, because there are no such things. Our biological mission is to preserve life, not to destroy It.
Human destructiveness Is never inborn, and inherited traits are neither good nor evil. How they develop depends on one’s character, which is formed In the course of one’s life, and the nature of which depends, in turn, on the experiences one has, above all, in childhood and adolescence, and on the decisions one makes as an adult.
Like every other child, Hitler was born innocent, only to be raised, as were many children at the time, in a destructive fashion by his parents and later to make himself into a monster. He was the survivor of a machinery of annihilation that in turn-of-the-century Germany was called “child-rearing” and that I call “the concealed concentration camp of childhood,” which is never allowed to be recognized for what it is.
I have described in detail how he made this concealed horror manifest in his Third Reich in my book For Your Own Good: Hidden cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983) and In my other books, for example, Banished Knowledge and The Untouched Key (both published by Doubleday). There the reader will also find a detailed line of reasoning to support everything which, for reasons of space, I can only allude to here in a very abridged way.”
After submitting the above quote, I thought it necessary to add that I’m in no way condoning or sympathizing in any way whatsoever w/Hitler or others who have committed similar atrocities. Nor do I have any particular interest in him, but I happened to stumble upon that article while researching dysfunctional child-rearing styles. I do believe that all children are born with the capacity to be good, but obviously something goes wrong along the way, and often it’s something the child has no control over or even knowledge of, if it occurs early enough. IMO.
Anyway.