Hitler and Heteroglossia

It’s a strange feeling knowing that Mikhail Bakhtin, Kenneth Burke, and Adolph Hitler were all, for lack of a better word, contemporaries. Discourse in the Novel was published at roughly the same time as Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, (1934-1935) to give a sense of perspective. In addition, Kenneth Burke published The Rhetoric of Hitler’s "Battle" in 1939, one of many critics to do so in the wake of the unabridged Mein Kampf’s translation.


However, Burke’s review was a departure from many others at the time, in that Burke engaged the text from a rhetorically critical perspective.
“Let us watch it carefully; and let us watch it, not merely to discover what political move is to follow Munich, and what move to follow that move, etc; let us try also to discover what kind of “medicine” this medicine man has concocted…” (Burke 191)
Burke was interested not only in the what of Mein Kampf, but also in the how.

One of the main takeaways of Burke’s analysis is Hitler’s ability to use ‘double speak’.
“Here, I think, we see the distinguishing quality of Hitler’s method as an instrument of persuasion, with reference to the question whether Hitler is sincere or deliberate, whether his vision of the omnipotent conspirator has the drastic honesty of paranoia or the sheer shrewdness of a demagogue trained in Realpolitik of the Machiavellian sort. Must we choose? Or may we not, rather, replace the “either-or” with a “both-and”?" (Burke, 211)

Burke was able to pick up on Hitler’s use of heteroglossia as a rhetorical device, although the term ‘heteroglossia’ wasn’t part of mainstream literary criticism just yet.
Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin postulated that heteroglossia is the coexistence of distinct linguistic varieties within a single language, and that “the novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized.” (Bakhtin, 262)

In simpler terms, Bakhtin believed that a novel was an artistic composition of several ‘voices’. These voices included the author, the narrator, the dialogue of multiple characters, and even the implied voice of the audience.
In this sense, Hitler’s Mein Kampf can be considered a novel, as it is a combination of two distinct ‘voices’: the earnest autobiography and the shrewd political outline. As Burke often noted, many critics and reviewers drew a stark line in the sand: Hitler was either a fanatical, racist ideologue, or a dangerously shrewd politician.
Both Burke and Bakhtin would say that Hitler was both, and possessed a dangerous ability to shift between both 'voices' with ease.
No doubt Bakhtin never intended his ideas of heteroglossia to be used the nefarious way Hitler used them, however, it must be said that Hitler’s Mein Kampf is one of the darkest examples of the importance of ‘double speak', or heteroglossia, as a rhetorical device.


Works Cited
Bakhtin, M. M., and Michael Holquist. "Discourse in The Novel." The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: U of Texas, 1981. N. pag. Print.
Burke, Kenneth. "The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle"" The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1967. N. pag. Print.