Looking Back At The Return of Mein Kampf In Germany

Last year a heavily annotated academic edition of Hitler's antisemitic tome, Mein Kampf, was published amidst controversy in Germany. The book became an unexpected bestseller, mainly among academics and history buffs, and won an academic prize. 

Below is a longer version of an article that I wrote in advance of its publication, examining the contrasting opinions about the book's re-emergence in Germany, 70 years after the death of its author.

Many wish that Adolf Hitler's hate-filled manifesto, Mein Kampf, would simply disappear. However, with the book about to enter the public domain in Germany in 2016, the country is again having to confront one of the most charged remnants of its Nazi past.

  

Since 1945, the state of Bavaria, which took over Hitler's estate after the US occupation, has been able to prevent publication of the tome as the copyright holder. But that control will cease when the copyright expires, 70 years after the author's death, on December 31st. 

The idea of anyone being able to publish their own German-language edition of Hitler's brutal text actually in Germany has, inevitably, provoked heated debate over how the situation should be handled, and whether it is appropriate, safe or moral for the dictator's self-mythologising and virulently anti-Semitic screed to go on sale in the cradle of the Third Reich. Dr. Charlotte Knobloch, President of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, is in no doubt about what the book represents, or what should happen to it. 

“Mein Kampf is the most evil anti-Semitic pamphlet ever published, and its repercussions were catastrophic,” she tells me by email. “It was the handbook for THE crime of the Nazis: the cold-blooded extermination of European Jews. This book needs to be locked away permanently.”

Knobloch acknowledges that the book's availability on the internet – including to Germans, who can download it from servers abroad; while anyone claiming academic research interest can buy a copy legally from an antiquarian bookshop – means that total suppression is not an option. Even so, she believes that making it widely available in print would be a step too far. 

“It should not be published in Germany, the country on whose behalf this unprecedented crime was committed. Mein Kampf was and is Pandora's Box – once opened it's impossible to re-close it, and the the evil escaping it will be impossible to trap again.”

Concerned about the potential impact of raw copies flooding the market after the December deadline, the Bavarian government gave 500,000 euros to Munich's highly respected Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ), in 2012, to help fund a critical edition that will attempt, Dr. Christian Hartmann, the historian leading the project, has said, to “defuse” Mein Kampf. 

The good intentions of the state were not enough to satisfy everyone, and Bavaria's premier, Horst Seehofer, found himself under pressure to rethink its participation. Following a trip to Israel with Knobloch, he announced that he was withdrawing funding. More outcry followed, this time from supporters of the work. Seehofer responded by withholding the government's seal of approval, but left its money to be funneled it into other IfZ research projects and replaced with funds from the institute's regular budget. IfZ will now publish the book independently.   

Asked why the government had changed its position, Hartmann says by email: “I think the state actors should answer this question by themselves. In fact, they didn't inform us on their motives when they changed their course. The state government later justified the withdrawal by stating that they didn't want to serve as 'political publisher' of a new edition of Mein Kampf."  Knobloch refers me to a December 11, 2013, story from the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which Seehofer pointed out the difficulty of putting the government's seal on Mein Kampf after calling for a ban on Germany's far-right NPD party. 

Neil Gregor, a professor at the University of Southampton and the author of How to Read Hitler, as well as other books on the Nazi era, identifies two main fears fueling the debate about re-publishing Mein Kampf: “The first is the obvious fear that the book will become an inspiration for the far Right once again. The second is that republication will send the wrong symbolic message about contemporary Germany’s relationship to the Nazi past: that it may give the impression that the German state sees this as distant history, part of Germany’s deep past, and no longer an issue in any meaningful contemporary way.”

Since neo-Nazis have long had access to Mein Kampf, he believes that the first fear, whilst not unfounded, has been “overstated”. Hartmann, likewise, says he “wouldn't overrate the danger of Mein Kampf; the book is, in many ways, the product of a very specific historical situation and many references are not understood any more. Nevertheless, the brutal anti-Semitism in Mein Kampf demands a decisive answer.” 

Hartmann, who is a member of the German-Israelite Society, says their edition will analyse this aspect of Hitler's ideology “very, very thoroughly”.

As for what kind of message permitting republication would convey, Gregor says “one might argue . . . that it is a symbolic gesture, too - a gesture of faith in the strength of German democracy, an affirmation that [Mein Kampf] is part of a historical past to which Germany will not return.”

The expiration of Bavaria's copyright will not remove all the barriers for would-be publishers of  Mein Kampf.  “Out of respect for the feelings of Holocaust survivors and their families,” says Ludwig Unger, the press speaker for the Bavarian Ministry of Education and Science, “the State Government will utilise the existing legal framework to prevent the inappropriate dissemination of Mein Kampf after the 31.12.2015.” Simply reproducing the original text will qualify as Volksverhetzung, or “incitement of popular hatred”, explains Knobloch. “Hence one doesn't have to fear a mass publication in Germany.” What this means for the IfZ annotated edition, however, “remains partially unclear”, she says. 

Hartmann calls the situation “confusing”. “But nevertheless, it can be taken for granted that an annotated edition that critically contrasts Hitler's propaganda and half-truths with historical facts is far apart from being anything like Volksverhetzung." 

He believes that the decision to impose a block during the 50s, 60s and 70s, when many more people who lived through the Third Reich were alive, was “good and clever”. Today, though, the prohibition “seems to be an anachronism”, he suggests. “In a world without taboos, this ongoing ban could cause the wrong curiosity.”

The IfZ has already published an annotated collection of Hitler's speeches, containing many of the ideas promulgated in Mein Kampf, but the latter has accrued an almost mystical power in the decades since the war. Their edition, therefore, sets out to deconstruct and contextualise Hitler's words, using around 3,500 annotations and a detailed introduction. The scholars trace the sources – some of them newly discovered - that Hitler drew on for the development of his ideology, says Hartmann, and illustrate how the Nazi leader was the product of his time and place. “This shows, again, that Hitler was by far not the only person to be responsible for the crimes of National Socialism.”

Importantly, they underscore how Hitler shouldn't be taken at face value by exposing his many lies and false claims, as well as some of the many contradictions between his words and deeds. For example, Hitler reproaches the Weimar Republic for not doing enough for veterans of World War One. Hartmann says they show that German welfare legislation for the veterans was “exemplary”, in fact, while reminding readers that between four and five thousand traumatised veterans were murdered with gas as part of the Third Reich's euthanasia programme.

“We comment with a density and intensity that hasn't existed before regarding Mein Kampf,” he says. “The comments are designed to offer something new even to scientific specialists, but in a way that can be read and understood by a broad public . . . What we say is that we encircle Hitler's book like in a battle.”

Around 12 million copies of Mein Kampf were distributed, with all newlyweds receiving it as a wedding gift from the Nazi state from 1936. There is some dispute over whether many people actually read it – Hartmann believes it was often set aside quickly, “simply because it is very theoretical, very badly written and endlessly boring” – but should those who did have been able to see what Hitler intended for the Jews? Is the book a blueprint for the Holocaust? 

“Only partially,” says Hartmann. “What is becoming evident is the fact that Hitler was a brutal and fanatical anti-Semite. But the scientific research, meanwhile, shows that it is still a long and sometimes meandering way to Auschwitz.”

©Stephen Applebaum, 2017