Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

morality as such, of the state or society, it is all the same, everything is reviled in the most
obscene terms and dragged into the filth of the basest possible outlook. When at the age of
fourteen the young man is discharged from school, it is hard to decide what is stronger in
him: his incredible stupidity as far as
any real knowledge and ability are concerned, or the corrosive insolence of his behavior,
combined with an immorality, even at this age, which would make your hair stand on end
What position can this man-to whom even now hardly anything is holy, who, just as he has
encountered no greatness conversely suspects and knows all the sordidness of life- occupy in
the life into which he is now preparing to emerge?
The three-year-old child has become a fifteen-year-old despiser of all authority. Thus far,
aside from dirt and filth, this young man has seen nothing which might inspire him to any
higher enthusiasm.
But only now does he enter the real university of this existence.
Now he begins the same life which all along his childhood years he has seen his father living.
He hangs around the street corners and bars, coming home God knows when; and for a
change now and then he beats the broken-down being which was once his mother, curses
God and the world, and at length is convicted of some particular offense and sent to a house
of correction.
There he receives his last polish.
And his dear bourgeois fellow men are utterly amazed at the lack of 'national enthusiasm' in
this young 'citizen.'
Day by day, in the theater and in the movies, in backstairs literature and the yellow press,
they see the poison poured into the people by bucketfuls, and then they are amazed at the
low 'moral content,' the 'national indifference,' of the masses of the people.
As though trashy films, yellow press, and such-like dung could. furnish the foundations of a
knowledge of the greatness of our fatherland!-quite aside from the early education of the
individual.
What I had never suspected before, I quickly and thoroughly learned in those years:
The question of the 'nationalization' of a people is, among other things, primarily a question
of creating healthy social conditions as a foundation for the possibility of educating the
individual. For only those who through school and upbringing learn to know the cultural,
economic, but above all the political, greatness of their own fatherland can and unit achieve
the inner pride in the privilege of being a member of such a people. And I can fight only for
something that I love, love only what I respect, and respect only what I at least know.
Once my interest in the social question was aroused, I began to study it with all
thoroughness. It was a new and hitherto unknown world which opened before me.
In the years 1909 and 1910, my own situation had changed somewhat in so far as I no
longer had to earn my daily bread as a common laborer. By this time I was working
independently as a small draftsman and painter of watercolors. Hard as this was with regard
to earnings-it was barely enough to live on- it was good for my chosen profession. Now I was
no longer dead tired in the evening when I came home from work, unable to look at a book
without soon dozing off. My present work ran parallel to my future profession. Moreover, I
was master of my own time and could apportion it better than had previously been possible.
I painted to make a living and studied for pleasure.
Thus I was able to supplement my visual instruction in the social problem by theoretical
study. I studied more or less all of the books I was able to obtain regarding this whole field,
and for the rest immersed myself in my own thoughts.
I believe that those who knew me in those days took me for an eccentric.