se dramatically, reaching almost ten million books sold.(4) But while people might not have read this book, thousands of them certainly listened voluntarily, or were obliged to listen, to his many inflammatory and hateful speeches. They often contained verbatim sections out of Mein Kampf so that people were confronted with its absurd goals whether they liked it or not. Hitler's rhetorical "art" as an author and as a speaker was evident in the way he used metaphorical expressions from conversational speech in order to clarify or extend more abstract arguments or ideas. Quite often Hitler uses so-called twin-formulas whose alliteration, rhyme, formulaic structure, and metaphors add expressive color and emotion to his otherwise lengthy sentences and paragraphs.Hitler had an aggressive style of writing based on folk speech, and it becomes clear that he uses the twin formulas in particular to characterize or embarrass his political enemies. He declares enemies of the movement to be "Neunmalkluge" (smart alecks), when he writes,"The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses. The fact that our smart alecks do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are," (180). He also calls them "Angsthasen" (chicken-hearted); "For the cursing and 'beefing' you could hear at the front were never an incitement to shirk duty or a glorification of the chicken-hearted. No! The coward still passed as a coward and as nothing else" (192). Opposers were "the type of lazybones who could perfectly well think, but from sheer mental laziness seizes gratefully on everything that someone else has thought, with the modest assumption that the someone else has exerted himself considerably" (241), and he believed that "only a bourgeois 'einfaltspinsel' (blockhead) is capable of imagining that Bolshevism has been exorcised" (661). In Mein Kampf Hitler already knows everything better than anybody else. Whoever...
