My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

Hitler is clearly a damaged individual, presumably by a process that began in his childhood and which because of some innate dynamic became reinforced in his youth and early adulthood, but that part of him that is damaged, which is the ability to approach and be close to another, the ability to empathize with another, which is to say to see the other in himself, himself in the other, has placed him outside himself, alienated him from his own emotional life, which is to say that an unbridgeable divide has opened up between his emotions and his understanding of his emotions, whereby he has been deposited outside the sphere of the social. The damage was in the times, and many of those who suffered it became artists, for in art the divide could be bridged.