[A_C_Slater]

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How would you characterize Hitler's religious beliefs? Discuss how he would likely self-identify himself and/or what his beliefs actually were.

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Like I already stated his belief's centered around Wagnerian Operas and Schopenhauer Philosophy.


From the Life and Death of:


'He said later that during WW1 he read only one book, but he read it again and again, finding in it the solutions to many problems that perplexed him. The book was [i]The World as Will and Idea, which celebrates the primacy of the will, seeing it in romantic isolation, detached and inviolable. The will alone rules; all else is illusion. Nevertheless, the assertive will finds itself endlessly frustrated, and the only salvation lies in renunciation through art and asceticism, in the comtemplation of the eternal ideas. Hitler's asceticism and his belief in himself as an srtist found powerful justification in Schopenhauer, whose extravagant romanticism helped him to endure the miseries of war.'


Hitler was not a literate one trick pony. It is very possible that Hitler was more widely read than just about anyone that ever lived (if not it would be close.) And he remembered everything he ever read. For the years when he was busto all he did was read books from the library. He read everything he could on art, theatre, opera, architecture, politics, history, etc.

This is why everyone had such trouble disputing his arguments, he had such a voluminous knowledge of everything that he could just exhibit pedantic displays of information overload until the opponent would retreat, feeling intellectually inferior. And yes a lot of the knowledge was based on kooky eugenics theories and a lot of the books he simply absorbed from them what he wanted and discarded the rest.

But a lot of people in Germany at the time believed these eugenics theories and the myth of the Aryan superman. He could not preach to an audience these kooky theories unless they held a bias towards these ideas.


(Somehow this all ended up in italics, I apologize.)