Mein Kampf
theater. All their unctuous asseverations now meant little or nothing. It was enough to look at one of the billboard pillars, and study the names of the originators of the awful movie and theatrical perpetrations which were advertised there in order to be hardened for a long time.
Here they were infecting the people with a pestilence, an intellectual pestilence worse than the Black Death of ancient days. And in what quantities this poison was produced and distributed! Naturally, the lower the intellectual and moral level of these art manufacturers, the more boundless is their fertility; such a fellow flings his offal in the face of humanity rather like a centrifugal machine. Besides, we must remember their unlimited number; remember that for every one Goethe nature plants at least ten thousand of these slimy creatures in the pelt of humanity, and they, disease carriers of the worst sort, poison souls.
It was a fact dreadful but inescapable that the Jew seemed specially chosen by nature in tremendous numbers for this horrible destiny.
Are we to suppose that this is the way in which he is “chosen”?
At that time I began carefully to examine the names of all the producers of these unclean products in the world of art. The result was ever more damaging to my previous attitude toward the Jews. Though my feelings were outraged a thousand times, my reason must still draw its conclusions. That nine-tenths of all the literary filth, artistic trash and theatrical nonsense must be debited to a people constituting scarcely a hundredth of all the country’s inhabitants could not simply be denied; it was a plain fact.
I now began to scrutinize even my beloved “world press” from this standpoint. But the deeper I probed, the more the object of my former adoration shrank. The style grew ever more intolerable, I objected to the content as flat and shallow, the objectivity of treatment now seemed to me rather a lie than honest truth; but the authors were—Jews.
A thousand things which I had once scarcely noticed now struck me as remarkable, while others, which had already given
68
