# Mein Kampf (Stackpole Sons)/Volume 2/Chapter 6

6. The Struggle of the Early Days The Importance of Speeches
The first great meeting, on February 24th, 1920, in the Hofbräuhaus Banquet Hall, had not yet ceased to echo within us by the time we began preparing for the next. Whereas it had always been thought doubtfully advisabe to hold a little meeting once a month or even once a fortnight in a city the size of Munich, it was now planned to have a great mass-meeting once a week. I need not say that one fear and one alone kept plaguing us: would people come, and would they listen to us?—even though I personally was unshakably convinced even then that once people are there they will stay and follow the speech.
During those days the Munich Hofbräuhaus Banquet Hall took on for us an almost consecrated significance. A meeting every week, almost always in that hall; and the place better filled, and the people more attentive every time. Starting with “War guilt,” to which at that time nobody paid any attention, and going on through the Peace Treaties, almost everything was dealt with that seemed expedient for purposes of agitation or necessary as a matter of ideas. In particular the greatest attention was given to the Peace Treaties. Again and again the young movement kept prophesying to the great masses of people, and by now almost every prophecy has been fulfilled. Today it is easy to talk or write about those things. But in those days a public mass-meeting embracing not bourgeois mediocrities but inflamed proletarians, and dealing with the subject of “The Peace Treaty of Versailles,” was tantamount to an attack on the Republic and a sign of reactionary if not monarchist principles. At the very first sentence criticizing Versailles one was the target of the stereotyped ​interruption, “And Brest-Litovsk?” “Brest-Litovsk!” The crowd would keep roaring this again and again, until it gradually got hoarse, or the speaker gave up trying to convince it. One could have beaten his head against the wall for despair of such a people! It would not listen and would not understand that Versailles was a shame and a disgrace; not even that that dictation amounted to an unheard-of plundering of our people. The Marxist work of destruction, and enemy propaganda poison, had put these people beyond reach of reason. And even so we had no right to complain. For how immeasurable was the guilt on the other side! What had the bourgeoisie done to call a halt to this fearful disintegration, to oppose it, and to clear the path for truth by better and more complete enlightenment? Nothing, and again nothing! In those days I never saw them anywhere—the great populist apostles of today. They may have been talking in clubs, at tea-tables, in like-minded circles; but where they should have been, among the wolves, there they never ventured—unless there was an opportunity to howl with them.
I myself realized that the question of War guilt must be cleared up, and cleared up in the sense of historical truth, for the little band that as yet made up the Party. That our movement should give a knowledge of the Peace Treaty to the great masses was an indispensable step toward the movement’s success in the future. In those days, when they all still saw the Peace as a success for democracy, it was necessary to make a stand against it, burning oneself into people’s brains forever as an enemy of that Treaty, so that later, when bitter reality should reveal the delusive tinsel unadorned, in all its naked hatred, the memory of our earlier attitude would win us their confidence.
Even that long ago I always advocated making a stand against the whole of public opinion, without regard for popularity, hatred, or battle, on certain important basic questions where its attitude was wrong. The N. S. D. A. P. must not be a tool of public opinion, but must become its master. It must be not the masses’ menial, but their lord.
Particularly for a movement that is still weak, there naturally ​exists a great temptation, at times when an overwhelmingly superior adversary has succeeded by his seductive wiles in driving the people to a mad decision or a wrong attitude, to follow along and join in the shouting, especially if from the young movement’s own standpoint a few reasons—though they be but apparent ones—seem to speak for it. Human cowardice seeks such reasons so eagerly that it almost always finds something to give colorable justification for joining in such a crime even from “its own standpoint.”
Several times I have met with cases where it took supreme energy not to let the ship of the movement float into the artificially-induced general current, or rather to let it drift with it. The last time was when our hellish press, to which after all the German people’s existence is as Hecuba, succeeded in lifting the South Tyrol question to an importance which will yet be disastrous to the German people. Without stopping to reflect whose work they were doing, many so-called “nationalist” men and parties and societies joined the general outcry simply out of cowardice in face of the public opinion inflamed by the Jews, and helped senselessly to support the struggle against a system which we Germans, precisely in the present situation, ought to regard as the one ray of light in a degenerate world. While the international world-Jew slowly but surely throttles us, our so-called patriots roar against the man and the system that have dared at least in one place on earth to withdraw from the Jewish-masonic embrace, and to offer nationalist resistance to this international world poison. But it was too tempting for weak characters simply to set their sails before the wind, capitulating to the outcry of public opinion. And a capitulation it was. Though people in their badness and falsity may not admit it, perhaps not even to themselves, it is nevertheless the truth that only cowardice and fear of the people’s temper, stirred up by the Jew, made them take part. All other explanations are contemptible excuses of the guilty little sinner.
Here it was necessary to yank the movement around with an iron hand in order to preserve it from ruin by this tendency. To undertake such a change of front at the moment when public ​opinion, fanned by every force that could drive it, is burning like a great flame in one single direction, is indeed a course momentarily not altogether popular, and in fact often almost dangerous to the life of the daring attempter. Not a few men in history have been stoned at such moments for an action that posterity later had every reason to thank them for on its knees.
That is what a movement must count on, not the momentary applause of the present. No doubt it is true that at such moments the individual grows fearful; but he must never forget that after every such moment comes deliverance, and that a movement seeking to renew a world must serve not the moment but the future.
In fact we can remark that the greatest and most lasting successes in history are usually those that met with the least understanding at the beginning, because they were in sharp opposition to general public opinion, its conclusions and its desires.
This we were able to learn for ourselves even then, on the first day of our public appearance. Verily we did not “court the favor of the masses,” but opposed the madness of the people, everywhere. During those years it almost always happened that I was appearing before a gathering of people who believed the opposite of what I meant to say, and wanted the opposite of what I believed. Then it would be a task of two hours to raise two to three thousand people out of their former convictions, to shatter the foundations of their old comprehensions blow by blow, and finally to lead them on to the ground of our conviction and our world-concept.
In the short time I learned something important, viz. to knock the weapon of the opponent’s retort from his hand myself at the outset. It was soon noticed that our adversaries, particularly as represented by their open-forum speakers, had a very definite “repertoire” in which constantly recurring objections were made to our assertions, so that the uniformity of the process indicated a purposeful and regular training. And so it was. Here we encountered the incredible discipline of our adversaries’ propaganda; and it is still my chief pride that I found the means not ​simply to make that propaganda ineffectual, but with it eventually to smite its own creators. Within two years I was a master in the art.
It was important in every single speech to realize in advance the probable substance and form of the objections to be expected in the discussion, and to pull these entirely to pieces beforehand in one’s own speech. It was expedient always to cite the possible objections oneself, and to prove their inapplicability; thus the listener, who came in an honest spirit even though stuffed with the objections he had been trained in, was more easily won over by the anticipatory refuting of the difficulties that had been impressed on his memory. The stuff he had been drilled in was automatically refuted, and his attention was attracted more and more to the speech.
This was the reason why after my very first lecture on “The Peace Treaty of Versailles,” which I delivered while still a so-called “education man” for the troops, I altered it to the extent of talking on subsequent occasions on “The Peace Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles.” For I had remarked within a very short time, in fact during the discussion after my first lecture, that in reality people knew nothing whatever about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, but that their parties’ skilled propaganda had contrived to pillory this particular treaty as one of the world’s most shameful acts of outrage. It was to be ascribed to the perseverance with which this lie was forever served up to the great masses that millions of Germans saw the Peace Treaty of Versailles merely as the retribution for the crime we had committed at Brest-Litovsk, and thus felt that any real struggle against Versailles was wrong and persisted in a moral indignation often deeply honest. And this was one of the reasons why the impudent, monstrous term “making amends” managed to get adopted in Germany. This most truthless of all hypocrisy seemed a real execution of higher justice to millions of our misled fellow-nationals. Horrible, but so it was. The best proof of this was the success of the propaganda which I now initiated against the Peace Treaty of Versailles, which I prefaced with a disquisition ​on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. I matched the two Peace Treaties, comparing them point by point, and showing the actual absolutely boundless humaneness of the one treaty as against the inhuman cruelty of the second; and my success was a smashing one. I have talked on that subject before meetings of two thousand people, where I was often met by the looks of thirty-six hundred hostile eyes. And three hours later I would have before me a billowing mass filled with holiest indignation and unbounded wrath. Once again a great lie had been torn from the hearts and brains of a crowd numbering thousands, and a truth planted in its stead.
At that time I considered these two lectures, viz; “The true causes of the World War” and “The Peace Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles,” my most important ones, so that I repeated and repeated them dozens of times in constantly new shapes until a certain clear and unified attitude on at least this one point was common among the people from among whom the movement drew its first members.
For me myself these meetings had the further advantage that I gradually changed over into a mass-meeting speaker, and grew adept in pathos and the gestures that a great room holding a thousand people demands.
Except—as I have emphasized before—for some small circles, I saw no enlightenment in this direction from the parties that now throw out their chests, acting as if they had produced a transformation in public opinion. But if a so-called nationalist politician did give a lecture of that tendency somewhere, it was sure to be only for circles already largely of his opinion, to whom what was said was at best a reinforcement of their own convictions. In those days that was not what counted; the important thing was to recruit, through enlightenment and propaganda, those people who by training and intellectual attitude were on the other side of the fence.
The leaflet too we put to work for this enlightenment. While I was still in the army I had written a leaflet with a comparison of the Peace Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles that had ​been distributed in tremendous editions. Later I took over elements of it for the Party, and here also the effect was good. The first meetings were indeed generally distinguished by the fact that the tables were covered with all kinds of leaflets, newspapers, pamphlets, etc. Still, the main emphasis was put on the spoken word. And it is in fact alone capable of producing really great upheavals, and this for general psychological reasons.
In the first volume I showed that every great and world-shaking event has been produced not by the written but by the spoken word. In part of the press this was followed by a long discussion in which naturally a very sharp stand was taken against that assertion, particularly by our bourgeois wiseacres. But the very reason this occurred confounded the doubters. For the bourgeois intelligentsia protests against that sort of approach only because it plainly lacks the vigor and capacity to influence the masses by the spoken word, having concentrated more and more on purely literary activity, abandoning the real agitator’s weapon of oratory. But in time such a habit leads perforce to that which distinguishes our bourgeoisie today, viz., the loss of the psychological instinct for mass effect and mass-influence.
While the speaker receives constant guidance from the crowd he is speaking before, inasmuch as he can judge all the time from the faces of his audience whether they are following his disquisition with understanding, and whether the effect and the impression of his words is leading to the desired goal, the writer does not know his readers at all. Consequently he will not aim from the outset at any definite crowd of people before his eyes, but will keep his treatment general. In that way he loses to a certain extent in psychological delicacy, and consequently in adaptability. And in general a brilliant speaker will write better than a brilliant writer speaks, unless he practices the art constantly. There is also the further fact that the masses of people are lazy by nature, remaining sluggishly in the rut of old habit, and they do not like to pick up anything written unless it accords with what they themselves believe, and offers what they hope for. Hence a written work of a given tendency is usually read ​only by people who already belong to that movement. At most a poster or a leaflet may be short enough to count on a moment’s attention from one who thinks differently. There is a better chance for the picture in all its forms, up to and including the moving picture. Here a man needs to depend still less on his understanding; it is enough simply to look, or at most to read very short captions; and consequently many people are much readier to take in a pictorial representation than to read a longer written work. Much more quickly—I might almost say at one blow—a picture gives a man enlightenment which he could get from written matter only by tedious reading.
But the most essential point is that written matter never knows what hands it will fall into, and yet it must retain its fixed form. In general the effect will be the greater, the more this form accords with the intellectual level and character of those who are to be its readers. A book intended for the broad masses must consequently try from the outset to give a different effect in style and elevation from a work destined for higher intellectual levels.
Only in this sort of adaptability does written matter approach the spoken word. The speaker may treat the same theme as the book; but if he is a great and inspired popular speaker he will scarcely repeat the same subject twice in the same form. He will always let himself be carried along by the broad masses in such fashion that his feeling will give him precisely the words he needs to move his audience of the moment. If he makes even the slightest mistake, he has the living correction constantly in front of him. As above mentioned, he can read from the expressions of his listeners in the first place whether they understand what he is saying, in the second place whether they can follow it all, and in the third place how completely they are convinced of the soundness of what they hear. If he sees—firstly—that they do not understand him, he will make his explanation so primitive and plain that the dullest must grasp it; if he feels—secondly—that they cannot follow him, he will build up his ideas so cautiously and slowly that even the feeblest among the whole crowd is ​not left behind; and—thirdly—if he suspects that they do not seem convinced of the truth of what he says, he will go on repeating with new illustrations, putting forward the unspoken objections he can sense, and refuting and shattering them until finally even the last opposition group shows by attitude and expression that it has surrendered to his arguments.
With human beings it is not infrequently a matter of overcoming prejudices that are not founded on reason, but supported only by feeling, mostly unconsciously. To overcome this barrier of instinctive dislike, emotional hatred, and prejudiced objection is a thousand times harder to correct than a faulty or mistaken intellectual opinion. False ideas and wrong knowledge can be eliminated by instruction, emotional resistances never. Only an appeal to these mysterious forces themselves can take effect here; and that can hardly ever be done by the writer, but almost solely by the speaker.
Of this the most striking proof is the fact that the bourgeois press, often very adroitly presented, flooding our people in editions of unheard-of millions, has not prevented the great masses from becoming the bitterest enemies of this very bourgeois world. The whole newspaper flood and all the books produced year after year by intellectualism flow off the millions of the lower classes like water off oiled leather. This can prove but two things: the unsound substance of this whole writing production of our bourgeois world, or else the impossibility of reaching the hearts of the broad masses by writing alone—particularly, of course, when the writing has so little psychological sense as is the case here.
Let it by no means be replied (as a great German-Nationalist paper in Berlin attempted to do) that Marxism itself disproves this assertion by its very writings, particularly by the effect of the basic work of Karl Marx. Probably no more superficial defense of an erroneous view has ever been attempted. What has given Marxism its astonishing power over the broad masses is by no means the formal, written product of Jewish brain work, but the enormous wave of oratorical propaganda that has ​possessed itself of the masses in the course of years. Out of a hundred thousand German workers, on an average not a hundred know this book, which has always been studied by a thousand times more intellectuals, and particularly Jews, than real followers of the movement from the great lower classes. And in fact the book was written not for the broad masses at all, but entirely for the intellectual leadership of the Jewish machine of world conquest; that machine has been stoked with other fuel—the press. For this it is that distinguishes the Marxist press from our bourgeois one. The Marxist press is written by agitators, and the bourgeois press attempts to carry on agitation by writers. The Social Democratic back-alley editor, who almost always comes to the editorial chair from the meeting-hall, has an unparalleled knowledge of his customers. But the bourgeois pen-wielder, appearing before the broad masses out of his study, is made unwell by their mere exhalations, and is thus helpless in dealing with them by the written word as well.
What has won the millions of workers for Marxism is less the Marxist Church Fathers’ way of writing than the tireless and truly tremendous propaganda work of ten-thousands of tireless agitators, from the great apostle of trouble-making down to the little union official and the picked man and question-period speaker; than the hundreds of thousands of meetings at which these speakers, standing on the table in a smoky pub room, have hammered away at the masses, thus acquiring a wonderful knowledge of this human material, a knowledge that has enabled them to choose the right weapons to attack the citadel of public opinion. And it is the gigantic mass demonstrations, the marches of a hundred thousand men, which have burned into the shabby little man the proud conviction that even though a poor worm he is a limb of a great dragon whose fiery breath will some day send the hated bourgeois world up in flames, and bring final victory to the proletarian dictatorship.
It was from such propaganda that the men came who were willing and prepared to read the Social Democratic press—a press which itself is not written but spoken. For whereas in the ​bourgeois camp, professors and bookish scholars, theorists and writers of every sort sometimes try to speak, in Marxism the speakers sometimes try to write. And especially the Jew (here particularly in evidence) will be, owing to his worthless dialectical adroitness and suppleness, more an oratorical agitator than a formative writer, even as an author.
This is why the bourgeois newspaper world (quite aside from the fact that it is largely Judasized too, and thus has no interest in really instructing the broad masses) has not the slightest influence on the attitude of the broadest classes of our people.
How hard it is to overthrow emotional prejudices, states of mind, feelings, etc., and to replace them with others, on how many scarcely tangible influences and conditions success depends—all this the sensitive speaker can judge from the fact that even the time of day at which his speech takes place may be of decisive importance for its effectiveness. The same speech, the same speaker, the same subject have entirely different results at ten in the morning, at three in the afternoon, and in the evening. I myself as a beginner sometimes called meetings for the morning, and I still remember particularly a demonstration which we staged in the Münchener-Kindl Cellar as a protest “against the oppression of German territories.” At that time this was Munich’s largest hall, and it seemed a very risky venture. To make attendance specially easy for the movement’s followers and for everyone else who might come, I set the meeting for a Sunday morning at ten o’clock. The result was crushing, but extremely instructive. The hall was full, the impression really stunning, but the general level of feeling was like ice; nobody warmed up, and I as a speaker was deeply unhappy at not being able to establish any relationship, even the slightest contact, with my audience. I believed I had spoken no worse than at other times, but the result seemed to be nil. When I left the meeting I was completely dissatisfied, if one experience the richer. Similar attempts that I made later led to the same result.
This need not surprise us. One has but to go to a theatrical performance, and look at a play at three in the afternoon, and ​the same play with the same cast at eight in the evening, and he will be astonished at the difference in the impression and effectiveness. A person with a sensitive feel and the ability to analyze this emotional state will notice at once that the impressiveness of the afternoon performance is less than that in the evening. The same statement holds even for a film. This is important, because in the case of the theater it might be said that possibly the actor does not work so hard in the afternoon as in the evening. But the movie does not differ in the afternoon and at nine in the evening. No: the time itself has a definite effect here, just as halls have on me. There are halls that likewise leave one cold, for reasons hard to discover, that somehow violently resist any generation of warmth. Traditional memories and conceptions existing in man may also decisively influence an impression. Thus a performance of Parsifal at Bayreuth will always have a different effect from one anywhere else in the world. The mysterious magic spell of the building on the Festspielhügel of the old Margraves’ city cannot be replaced or even compensated for by externals.
All these cases are a matter of diminishing man’s freedom of will. Of course this is truest of political meetings, which of their nature are attended by people of contrary will, who have then to be won over to a new purpose. In the morning, and even during the day, people’s will-power seems to resist with utmost energy the imposition of an outside will and an outside opinion. In the evening, on the other hand, it more easily succumbs to the dominating force of a stronger will. For in truth every such meeting represents the wrestling of two opposing forces. A man of dominating, apostolic character will by his outstanding oratory succeed in winning to the new purpose men whose resistance has already been quite naturally weakened, more easily than those still in full possession of their force of mind and will.
The same purpose is served by the artificial and yet mysterious twilight of Catholic churches, the burning candles, incense, censers, etc.
In wrestling with the adversaries to be converted, the speaker ​will gradually develop that wonderful sensitivity to the psychological requirements of propaganda which the writer almost always lacks. Consequently written work, with its limited effectiveness, ordinarily will serve rather to preserve, strengthen and deepen an already existing view or set of principles. Really great historical upheavals have never been produced, but at most accompanied, by the written word.
It must not be supposed that the French Revolution would ever have been brought into being by philosophic theories if it had not found an army of trouble-makers led by demagogues in the grand manner, who inflamed the passions of a people already tormented, until at last the fearful volcanic eruption followed that froze all Europe with horror. And similarly the greatest revolutionary upheaval of recent times, the Bolshevist Revolution in Russia, came about not through Lenin’s writings, but through the hate-stirring oratorical activity of countless incendiary apostles great and small.
This people of illiterates really was not inspired to the Communist Revolution by theoretical reading of such as Karl Marx, but by the shining heaven that thousands of agitators—who were, it is true, all working for an idea—promised to the people.
So it was, and so it will always be.
It accords perfectly with our German intelligentsia’s obstinate isolation from life to believe that the writer must necessarily be the speaker’s superior in intellect. This notion is deliciously illustrated by a review in the nationalist paper already mentioned, in which it is remarked that one is often disappointed on suddenly seeing an admittedly great orator’s speech in print. That reminds me of another review that fell into my hands during the war; it put the speeches of Lloyd George, who was at that time still Munitions Minister, painstakingly under the magnifying glass—to arrive at the brilliant conclusion that these addresses were intellectually and philosophically inferior products, banal and obvious. I got hold of some of these speeches myself, in the shape of a tiny volume, and I could not help laughing aloud at the way these masterpieces of psychological and spiritual steering ​of the masses left the ordinary German goose-quill warrior completely blank. This man judged the speeches simply by the impression they made on his own blasé nature, while the great English demagogue was working exclusively to influence the mass of his listeners and, in the widest sense, the entire lower-class English nation, as much as possible. From that standpoint this Englishman’s speeches were marvelous performances, because they displayed an absolutely astonishing knowledge of the soul of the lower levels of the common people. And their effect was in fact tremendous.
Compare with this the helpless babble of a Bethmann-Hollweg. His speeches did indeed appear to be more intelligent, but in reality they showed only the man’s inability to speak to his people, which he was a stranger to. And yet the birdlike brain of a German scribbler, naturally of the highest scientific cultivation, could evaluate the intellectuality of the English Minister by the impression which a speech intended for mass effect made on his own nature, ossified for very knowledge; and could compare it with the kind of a German statesman whose intellectual chatter of course fell on much more fruitful soil in his own case. That Lloyd George was in genius not merely equal to a Bethmann-Hollweg, but a thousand times superior, he proved by the way he found for his speeches the form and the expression that opened the heart of his people to him, and finally brought the people to work absolutely for his will. The very primitiveness of the language, the directness of its forms of expression, and the use of easily understandable elementary illustrations prove the Englishman’s outstanding political capacity. For I must measure a stateman’s speeches to his people not by the impression they will make on a university professor, but by the effect they have on the people. That alone is the yardstick of the speaker’s genius.
The astonishing development of our movement, which was founded a few years ago out of nothing, and today is already thought worthy of being bitterly hounded by every enemy of our people within and without, is to be attributed to constant ​mindfulness and application of these conclusions.
Important as the writings of the movement may be, in our present situation they will mean more to the unified and uniform training of superior and subordinate leaders than to the enlisting of hostile masses. Only in the rarest cases will a convinced Social Democrat or a fanatical Communist condescend to purchase a National-Socialist book or even a pamphlet, read it, and from it gain an insight into our conception of the universe, or study the criticism of his own. Even a newspaper will very seldom be read unless it bears the stamp of party regularity from the outset. Even if it were, it would do little good, for the total impression of a single issue of a newspaper is so diffuse, and its effect so disconnected, that no effect on the reader must be expected from a single reading. Nor must one expect of a person for whom even pennies count that he should subscribe to an opposition paper out of a pure urge for objective enlightenment. Scarcely one among thousands will do it. Only the man who has already been won by the movement will regularly read the party organ as the current news service of his movement.
The “spoken” leaflet is another matter. Somebody is much more likely to look at it, particularly if he gets it gratis, and even more if the very headline vividly treats a theme that is in everyone’s mouth at the moment. When he has read it more or less carefully, he may possibly be made aware of new attitudes and points of view, even of a new movement. But even this at best merely gives a gentle push, and never creates an accomplished fact. For the leaflet too can only suggest or call attention to something, and it becomes effective only in connection with subsequent and more thorough instruction and enlightenment of its readers. And that always means the mass meeting.
The mass meeting is necessary because (if for no other reason) there the individual, who feels isolated as a budding member of a young movement, and may easily come to fear he will be alone, sees for the first time the spectacle of a larger fellowship, which has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people. The same man would go over the top as a unit in a company or a ​battalion, surrounded by all his comrades, with a lighter heart than he would if he had to depend altogether on himself. In a pack he always feels somewhat safer, even though in reality there may be a thousand reasons against it.
The community character of a big demonstration not only strengthens the individual, but unites, and helps to produce esprit de corps. The man who is first in his office or factor to assert a new doctrine, and hence is subjected to heavy pressures, has need of the strength to be found in the conviction that he is a fighter for and a member of a great, all-embracing body. He can get his first impression of this body only from a common mass demonstration. When he comes from his little workshop or from the big firm, in which he feels small indeed, into a mass meeting for the first time, and finds thousands and thousands of men with similar convictions around him; when he is swept away as a seeker into the tremendous stream of hypnotic intoxication and enthusiasm of three to four thousand others; when the visible success and the affirmation of thousands confirm the rightness of the new doctrine, and awaken for the first time a doubt of his previous belief’s truth—then he himself succumbs to the magic influence of what we describe by the words mass suggestion. The will, the longing, and likewise the strength of thousands accumulates in each individual. The man who comes into such a meeting doubting and wavering goes away inwardly fortified; he has become a member of a community.
The National-Socialist movement must never forget this, and above all it must never let itself be influenced by the bourgeois nit-wits that know better about everything, but have nevertheless tossed away a great State along with their own existence and the domination of their class. They are monstrously smart, no doubt, can do anything, understand everything—only one thing they could not do: prevent the German people from falling into the arms of Marxism. Here they were a wretched and pitiful failure, so that their present conceit is but presumption, which is well-known as the yokefellow of stupidity: ignorance is the mother of presumption.
​If today these people allow no special merit to the spoken word, it is merely because they have already convinced themselves, thank God, of the ineffectuality of their own harangues.