Yet the other striking—and, in its way, perhaps explanatory—thing about the book is how petty-bourgeois (in the neutral, descriptive sense that Marx, or, for that matter, Kierkegaard, used the term) its world picture is, even including the petty-bourgeois bias toward self-contempt. The class nature of Hitler’s experience is as clear to him as it is to the reader—he is, he knows, a child of the lower middle classes, and his view of the world is conditioned by that truth.

His pervasive sense of resentment must have vibrated among those who know resentment as a primary emotion. Creepy and miserable and uninspiring as the book seems to readers now, its theme of having been dissed and disrespected by every authority figure and left to suffer every indignity must have resonated with a big chunk of an entire social class in Germany after war and inflation. Even his Jew-hating bears the traces of personal rancor as much as of “scientific” racial ideology. The poison of anti-Semitism comes in many flavors, after all, but the kind that, for instance, Drumont, in France, or Chesterton and Belloc, in Britain, had until then favored was aristocratic in pretension. It assumed that Jews have a secret, conspiratorial power. Admiration is mixed with the disgust, as with the parallel “yellow peril” of the Asians—they’re so smart that they’re sinister.

Hitler’s anti-Semitism seems a purer case of petit-bourgeois paranoia. It resents not the newcomer who invades the sanctuary but the competitor in the shop down the street, who plays by unfair rules. (“I didn’t know what to be more amazed at: the agility of their tongues or their virtuosity at lying.”) It’s telling that his anti-Semitism in “Mein Kampf” is, early on, entangled with his Francophobia. The Jews are like the French: they are, in plain English, the people who get to go to art school. Both the Francophobia and the anti-Semitism are part of the same petty-bourgeois suspicion: They think they’re superior to us! They think they’re better than us because they’re slicker than we are! They look down on us, and it is intolerable to have anyone look down on us! That fear of mockery and of being laughed at is so strong in Hitler that it filled his speeches as late as the onset of the war: the Jews and the English are laughing at me, and they won’t be allowed to laugh for long! That someone would feel this sense of impending shame as a motive for violence is commonplace. But that someone would choose to make so overt his love of violence arises from a fear of being mocked, and that he would use this as the source of his power seems weirdly naked and unprotected.

Here we touch on a potentially absurd but also possibly profound point. The resemblance of Charlie Chaplin to Hitler is one of the fearful symmetries of twentieth-century life, one that could hardly have been imagined if it were not so—Chaplin even writes in his autobiography that, when he was shown postcards of Hitler giving a speech, he thought that the German leader was doing “a bad imitation” of him. There were, of course, millions of men with toothbrush mustaches, but the choice by a performer or politician to keep or discard a symbolic appurtenance is never accidental. Chaplin chose to use the mustache because, as Peter Sellers once said of the little mustache he placed on his petty-bourgeois hero, Inspector Clouseau, it is the natural armor of the insecure social classes. The twitch of the mustache is the focal point of the Tramp’s social nervousness, as much as his flat, awkward feet are the focal point of his ingenuousness. Chaplin’s insecurity-armor is gallant and Hitler’s aggrieved, but both wear the mustache to claim more social dignity than the wearer suspects society wants to give him. (Hitler seems to have been forced during the Great War to trim an earlier, more luxuriant mustache—the point is that he kept and cultivated the abbreviation.)

“Mein Kampf” is a miserable book, but should it be banned? I could certainly sympathize with any German who would like to see it kept illegitimate; some speech should, in fact, be off-limits. But is it a dangerous book? Does it circulate sinister ideas best kept silent? Putting aside the book’s singularly creepy tone, it contains little argumentation that wasn’t already commonplace in other, still-circulating anti-Semitic and extreme-right literature. Hitler’s character remains bewildering, in the obvious mismatch between the extent of his miserableness and the capacity of his will to power, although perhaps it should not be—many other personal stories suggest that miserable people have the will to power in the greatest intensity. But his themes are part of the inheritance of modernity, ones that he merely adapted with a peculiar, self-pitying edge and then took to their nightmarish conclusion: the glory of war over peace; disgust with the messy bargaining and limited successes of reformist, parliamentary democracy and, with that disgust, contempt for the political class as permanently compromised; the certainty that all military setbacks are the results of civilian sabotage and a lack of will; the faith in a strong man; the love of the exceptional character of one nation above all others; the selection of a helpless group to be hated, who can be blamed for feelings of national humiliation. He didn’t invent these arguments. He adapted them, and then later showed where in the real world they led, if taken to their logical outcome by someone possessed, for a time, of absolute power. Resisting those arguments is still our struggle, and so they are, however unsettling, still worth reading, even in their creepiest form.