Mein Kampf:
The world’s most dangerous book?
by Fiona Macdonald
Adolf Hitler’s Mein
Kampf falls out of copyright in Germany at the end of 2015. What will
happen when authorities can no longer control its publication and
distribution?
“They wanted to replace
the Bible.” Whispering in a hushed room of the Bavarian State Library,
rare books expert Stephan Kellner describes how the Nazis turned a
rambling, largely unreadable screed – part memoir, part propaganda –
into a central part of the Third Reich’s ideology.
As Mein Kampf comes out
of copyright – meaning that, in theory, anyone could publish their own
editions in Germany – in early January this year, BBC’s Radio 4 launched
a new programme exploring what authorities can do about one of the
world’s most notorious books.
According
to the producer of Publish or Burn, which was broadcast on January 14,
it remains a dangerous text. “The history of Hitler is a history of
underestimating him; and people have underestimated this book,” says
John Murphy, whose grandfather translated the first unabridged English
language version in 1936.
“There’s a good reason to take it seriously because it is open to
misinterpretation.
‘Beer Hall’
Even though Hitler wrote it in the 1920s a lot of what he said in it,
he carried out – if people had paid a bit more attention to it at the
time maybe they would have recognised the threat.”
Hitler began writing Mein Kampf while in prison for treason after the
failed 1923 ‘Beer Hall’ putsch in Munich, outlining his racist,
anti-Semitic views.
Once he gained power a decade later, the book became a key Nazi text,
with 12m copies printed; it was given to newly married couples by the
state and gold-leaf editions were displayed prominently in the homes of
senior officials.
At the end of World War Two, when the US Army seized the Nazis’
publisher Eher Verlag, rights for Mein Kampf passed to the Bavarian
authorities.
They ensured the book was only reprinted in Germany under special
circumstances – but the expiration of its copyright in December 2015 has
prompted fierce debate on how to curb a publishing free-for-all.
“The Bavarians have used copyright to control republication of Mein
Kampf but that control is coming to an end – what happens next?” says
Murphy.
Chapter and verse
“This is still a dangerous book – there are issues with neo-Nazis,
and a danger of people misinterpreting it if it’s not put into context.”
Some question whether anyone would want to publish it – according to the
New Yorker, “It is full of bombastic, hard-to-follow clauses, historical
minutiae, and tangled ideological threads, and both neo-Nazis and
serious historians tend to avoid it.”
Yet the book has become popular in India with politicians who have
Hindu nationalist leanings. “It is considered to be a very significant
self-help book,” Atrayee Sen, a lecturer in contemporary religion and
conflict at the university of Manchester, tells Radio 4. “If you take
the element of anti-Semitism out, it is about a small man who was in
prison who dreamt of conquering the world and set out to do it.”
Publish or Burn
The removal of context is one of the fears of those opposed to
republication. In Publish or Burn Ludwig Unger, spokesman for the
Bavarian Ministry of Education and Culture, says: “The result of this
book was that millions of people were killed, millions were maltreated,
whole areas were overrun with war. It’s important to keep this in mind
and you can do that when you read certain passages with appropriate
critical historical commentary.”
When the copyright expires, the Institute for Contemporary History in
Munich plans to bring out a new edition of Mein Kampf that combines the
original text with a running commentary pointing out omissions and
distortions of the truth. Some victims of the Nazis oppose this
approach, and the Bavarian government withdrew its support for the
Institute after criticism from Holocaust survivors.
Yet suppressing the book might not be the best tactic – an op-ed in
the New York Times argued that: “The inoculation of a younger generation
against the Nazi bacillus is better served by open confrontation with
Hitler’s words than by keeping his reviled tract in the shadows of
illegality.”
Murphy acknowledges that a global ban on the book is impossible.
“This is more to do with the Bavarian authorities making a point, rather
than really being able to control it. They have to take a stand, even if
in the modern world it won’t prevent people getting access.”
Publish or Burn’s presenter Chris Bowlby argues that symbolic actions
still matter. After the copyright expires, the state plans to prosecute
using the law against incitement to racial hatred. “From our point of
view Hitler’s ideology corresponds to the definition of incitement,”
says Ludwig Unger. “It’s a dangerous book in the wrong hands.”
-BBC (Carl de Souza/Getty Images) |