Page 88 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Hitler’s Ghost

opened the floodgates on CURSE and CATARACT, sucking entire
digital libraries into his spinning turbines. And not just sources in
English: as he had said, the sky was the limit. The Europeans were at
least as advanced as the Americans in this regard, and Ludwig wanted
to process as much data as possible in what might be his only chance
to demonstrate his process on the scale for which he had designed it.
And, again as he had surmised, unexpected discoveries were made.
Shakespeare, it turned out, could not be definitely eliminated as the
author of his own works. But another hidden authorship emerged,
with a very high likelihood of accuracy: Adolf Hitler had not written
Mein Kampf. The budding Fuhrer, according to tradition, had dictated
his manifesto in 1924 to Rudolf Hess while a prisoner following the
SA’s unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch. Ludwig’s analysis of hundreds of
thousands of contemporary books and articles showed this not to be
the case. Nothing Hitler wrote following his vacation in Landsberg
Prison matched the writing in the book that made his fame and
fortune. Nor did it sufficiently resemble the style of Hess or any
other Nazi known to have visited Hitler during his incarceration.
That was enough to rile up every neo-Nazi on both continents.
And it might have stimulated one of those types to go after Ludwig.
Unfortunately, CURSE and CATARACT, after digesting immense
quantities of German literature from the early twentieth century,
came up with Mein Kampf’s probable author, a little-known journalist
named Hacken Dreikopf. The latter, after writing an article critical of
the Ludendorff government—from a political position diametrically
opposed to that of the National Socialists—had been imprisoned, as
well, in Landsberg in 1924. He died there, in 1927, after contracting
tuberculosis, but several of his earlier pieces were extant in
publications scanned during a recent digitization initiative in Bavaria.
And Herr Dreikopf was Jewish, a fact he had kept hidden in order
to obtain and retain his position in Weimar Germany. How had
Hitler, realizing his own inability to concoct an adequately sensational
narrative, enlisted Dreikopf to be a ghostwriter? Despite Hitler’s
assertion that one could not be both a German and a Jew, hundreds
of thousands of German Jews had taken the path of assimilation over
the decades: had Hacken Dreikopf been caught in a web of his own
device, unable to refuse the demands of a man who received special
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