In 1938, during Kristallnacht, the Jews of Baden-Baden were rounded up by the SS and marched into the town’s old synagogue. They were kept there for hours. Forbidden from using the toilets, they had no choice but to relieve themselves on the floor. One of them, Arthur Flehinger, was made to stand before the congregation and recite passages from Mein Kampf. It was a sick parody of a Torah reading.

Few read Mein Kampf today, 100 years after the publication of its first volume. Few, probably, ever did. But there are two things about it which educated people are expected to know.

The first is that it’s evil. Lord Bullock wrote that the book has ‘few rivals in the repulsiveness of its language, its tone and above all its contents’. There was a furore ten years ago over the publication of a critical edition; one of its most determined opponents, Jeremy Adler, collected his essays on the subject under the rubric ‘Absolute Evil’. The book is often whispered of as a danger in itself, a vector of a deadly pathogen. When, in 1979, West Germany’s supreme court acquitted a man who had attempted to sell it, the essayist Fritz J. Raddatz objected: ‘the scars are still too fresh, the bacillus too lively, the danger of infection too acute’.

The second thing people tend to know about Mein Kampf, somewhat at odds with the idea of its contagious power, is that it’s very, very boring. Of course, the book is repetitive: it is after all the fruit of a repetitive mind. Everything in Hitler’s analysis had to relate back to the Jews: his thinking is monocausal, his antisemitism monomaniacal, so the book must be monotonous. Social Democracy, the object of Hitler’s ire in one chapter, is a Jewish trick; parliamentarianism, which he moves onto next, is ‘the instrument of that race which in its inner goals must shun the light of day’. He finds a Jewish hand, too, behind syphilis and prostitution. (In the search for the psychological origins of Hitler’s antisemitism, it used to be rumoured that the young Hitler had contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute.)

The repetitiveness of Mein Kampf can feel at times like a bad pastiche of the music Hitler loved; he reaches for the same leitmotifs over and over and over. It is no coincidence, as Peter Viereck observed in 1941, that Mein Kampf was composed during his comfortable captivity at Landsberg Prison ‘amid the heroic bray of Wagnerian phonograph records’. Wagner figures prominently in the book, in Hitler’s reminiscences about watching Lohengrin and in his cry for a new Siegfried. ‘My youthful enthusiasm for the master of Bayreuth’, he emphasised, ‘knows no bounds.’

It is difficult to know how to approach Mein Kampf’s centenary. In Britain the moment has been marked by a Radio 4 documentary presented by John Kampfner, author of Why the Germans Do It Better. This includes some interesting material, especially on the use of Mein Kampf at the Nuremberg Trials, but it falls flat towards the end when it insists, as is to be expected, upon drawing parallels between the fevered rhetoric of Mein Kampf, and the populists of today.

These echoes are superficial at best. If taken on its own terms, rather than in the hunt for contemporary resonances, any modern-day reader of Mein Kampf will be struck by how alien it is. The Nazi mental universe, after all, is very far removed from our own.

Trump is mentioned by name in the documentary, as are Meloni and Orbán, but one of the striking things about Trump’s psychology is his lack of introspection. ‘I don’t like to analyse myself’, he declared back in 2014, ‘because I might not like what I see.’ Mein Kampf, on the other hand, is as divulging as it is digressive – even, perhaps especially, where Hitler is not telling the truth. He claims, for example, to have been tormented by left-wing trade-unionists while working with them on a building-site in Munich: they ‘forced me either to leave the building at once or be thrown off the scaffolding’. People who knew Hitler at the time have confirmed that the story is false (one of many falsehoods in the book), but it says something about him that he would make up such a thing; that he would cast himself as the victim of bullying, no doubt by burlier types. Mein Kampf, in this respect, is very clearly the work of a failed artist: of one who believes, as failed artists are wont to do, that his genius has not been adequately recognised, that he is a victim of the harsh, physical world, and that every detail of his inner life is deserving of the world’s attention. In Mein Kampf we are presented with the ultimate illustration of the latter species of what the writer John Ganz memorably set out as the ‘Jock/Creep Theory of Fascism’.

The Hitler of Mein Kampf is the outcast, the misfit, the creep. It is often said that he preached an ideology of strength, of might-makes-right, and he did; but Mein Kampf is as much about weakness and victimhood as it is about strength. Hitler spends practically the entire book stewing in his own self-pity. The book begins with him lamenting that his father never gave him the respect which his talents had merited: ‘the juvenile disputes I had with [him] did not lead him to appreciate his son’s oratorical gifts’. The German Volk, meanwhile, is likewise a victim – held back for centuries by the Habsburgs, hemmed in by Slavs, humiliated by greater Aryan powers, and always cheated by the Jews. Those searching for present-day analogies – those determined to call to mind the ‘strongmen’ of the 21st century – might find them better furnished among fascists of the ‘Jock’ variety (for whom, as Ganz says, Mussolini serves as the ideal-type). They will not find much to work with in Mein Kampf.

That Mein Kampf is a distinctly whiny book has won it some recent admirers (if that is the right word). The final volume of Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min Kamp (My Struggle) cycle – the German publishers, in case you were wondering, declined to translate the title literally – has the author reading Mein Kampf and finding something there, at least, with which to empathise and identify.

Others have been drawn to Mein Kampf with a rather less literary rationale. It has always enjoyed a wide readership in the Arab world, principally on account of its antisemitism. In 1939 Time magazine reported on its popularity in Palestine. More recently, Israel’s President Herzog claimed that the IDF had recovered an Arabic Mein Kampf from the home of a Hamas terrorist in Gaza.

Many of those who bothered to read Mein Kampf at the time, in any case, understood well what it was and what it meant. Oxford’s Robert Ensor wrote a pamphlet on it in 1939. That Hitler had so comprehensively disclosed the ‘principles and purposes that guide [his] acts’ laid bare the nonsense of appeasement: ‘for anyone who had read the book thoroughly such a conclusion’ as Neville Chamberlain’s at Munich ‘must be almost impossible’. The Cato journalists behind Guilty Men struck a similar chord. Mein Kampf, they declared, was the first of many ‘warnings which had previously been issued to the rulers of Britain’; if only they had listened.

As we approach a run of grim centenaries in the 2030s and 2040s, this strange centenary ought to be borne in mind. Mein Kampf focuses our minds on the unsettling fact that, when the Nazis won in Germany, they did so more or less openly. It is not a subtle work: it does not trade (to use one of Kampfner’s favoured terms) in ‘dog-whistles’. Hitler made it known, many years before he attained power, what he was about.

‘It will always remain the greatest mystery of the Third Reich’, wrote Victor Klemperer, ‘that Hitler still came to power, and that he should have held sway for 12 years, despite the fact that this bible of National Socialism had been in circulation for years prior to the takeover.’ The mystery will probably never be adequately resolved, but those who read Mein Kampf at the time, and read it carefully, understood the Germany and the world of the 1930s better than those who did not. There may be many good reasons now, 100 years on from its first appearance, not to want to read this evil, boring book; but it can also help us better understand a historical moment which still so profoundly structures our world, as it fades into the distance.