My friend Joachim von Halasz has very kindly given me a copy of his publishing house’s latest historical reprint – the marvellously titled Hitler the Truffle Eater. Written by Humbert Wolfe and first published in 1933, the book satirises the Nazis in the form of Hoffmann’s famous Struwwelpeter. My favourite poem is ‘The Story of Goering who would not have the Jews’, which successfully captures the infantilism of antisemitism:

Will he listen? He will not,

“If I were the lieber Gott

(As cocaine suggests I am),

I would smear the tribe like jam,

Or like parasitic butter,

On the walls and in the gutter.

Take the nasty Jews away,

I do not want the Jews to-day.

(It’s interesting to note that Goering’s appetite for what we now call Class-A drugs was well known in the early 1930s.)

Another passage that made me smile, despite its poor scansion, was the following observation about Hitler’s politics:

But though rather like a tweeny

In the clothes of Mussolini,

Adolf, you can shelter when in

Doubt, behind your uncle Lenin.

Note Wolfe’s comparison to Lenin. It’s important to remember that so much of what we call the ‘far-right’ has its roots in thinking from the left. Nick Griffin is an authoritarian left-winger. So was Adolf Hitler.

The book can be bought on amazon.co.uk and is also available directly from Foxley Books.