Dietrich von Hildebrand: "Mein Kampf Gegen Hitler"

I am currently reading a great new book, My Battle Against Hitler, a collection of entries by Dietrich von Hildebrand in his memoirs translated and edited by John Henry Crosby with John F. Crosby. It's very intense and informative; it details von Hilebrand's intellectual war against National Socialism as well as the events in his own life which occurred around the time of Hitler's ascendancy. These events have to do with basically getting in the middle of fierce arguments and near-brawls with anti-Semites and fascists, having his wife get threatening phone calls, finding out the Nazis wanted to kill him and finally having to flee the country to save his life. And I'm only on page 60! Since I am not very far in the book I'm not ready to review it, but I will be excerpting sections from it here and in the weeks to come. This is from an introductory chapter titled "A Fateful Decision":

What might von Hildebrand have called this volume? We will never know, and given his humility he might have suggested a title which honored his collaborators rather than himself. But he did, unwittingly, provide the title. Searching the pages of his memoirs, we discovered that he had entitled an outline for part for part of his memoirs "Mein Kampf Gegen Hitler"—"My Battle Against Hitler". Thus was the present volume christened.

A lot of his intellectual lectures and argumentation which I've read so far have been against contemporaries who had an idea that collectivism of some type — usually national socialism but sometimes communism — can and should be compatible with Christianity and, in some way, the collectivist concept of community is actually a Christian idea and should be pursued for that very reason. Von Hildebrand referred to this misconception as an overemphasis of the notion of community at the expense of the individual. Here is his response to the erroneous idea:

My talk was the fruit of all the investigations which formed the subject of my book The Metaphysics of Community which had been published two years before. In the talk I sought to make very clear that every attempt to establish a community at the expense of the individual person is not only in itself false but necessarily leads to a misconception of the true nature of community. I pointed out the horror of antipersonalism and totalitarianism, showing their absolute incompatibility with Christian revelation, and I criticized the false thesis of Hegel who held that the state is a higher entity that the individual. Only the individual person is a substance in the full sense, while the state is only a quasi-substance.

At the same time, I stressed the reality and dignity of true community in contrast to every kind of false liberal individualism. All of this was philosophically grounded with great case, yet there was no chance of convincing the other members of the committee, who were not very acute philosophically and who had allowed themselves to be swept away by the Zeitgeist.

The spirit of the age in these encounters mirrors the intellectual bankruptcy and moral corruption in our own. And yet there was something much more threatening at that time because of the will to enact horrible evils in the form of direct violence upon individuals and institutions on the part of Hitler and his followers. I have a friend who invariably brings up Hitler whenever the two of us discuss Obama and his awful policies. Recently I took issue with him. I said "OK, I know what you mean, but you are going to lose at least 50% of the people if you compare Obama to Hitler. Obama isn't scratching people off left and right for opposing him." Hitler was elected, but years before he ever was made chancellor he was organizing fascist attempts at government takeovers. He was way beyond political dirty tricks; he was into violence, threats of violence and destruction to achieve his ends. Reading this book really reveals the fear of that time and place and brings it home to me in an incredibly personal way as a Catholic and as someone with a family.