BERLIN — Not since 1945, when the Allies banned the dubious work and awarded the rights to the state of Bavaria, has Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, been officially published in German.
Bavaria had refused to release it. But under German law, its copyright expires Dec 31, the 70th year after the author’s death.
That allows a team of historians from a noted centre for the study of Nazism, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, to publish its new two-volume, 2,000-page edition, a three-year labour complete with about 3,500 academic annotations.
The intention is to set the work in historical context, to show how Hitler wove truth with half-truth and outright lie, and thus to defang any propagandistic effect while revealing Nazism.
“This is really one of the best relics we have of the Third Reich,” said Dr Christian Hartmann, the historian who led the five-person team on the project and unveiled the work to journalists yesterday (Dec 1). He compared it to Hitler’s lair at Obersalzberg in the Alps, which 2 million visitors a year now view, passing first through an exhibit on Nazism designed by the institute.
Germans have become more at ease with public mention of Hitler, even reintroducing him in popular culture, as in the 2004 movie Downfall and a newly filmed version of the best-selling comic novel Look Who’s Back.
The new edition of Hitler’s two-volume work — a combination of memoir, party program, anti-Semitic rant and expos on how to gain power — certainly would not be a conventional publishing sensation.
Dr Hartmann and the institute’s director, Dr Andreas Wirsching, said it was not clear whether the first run of about 3,500 to 4,000 copies would sell, either modestly or extraordinarily well, when it appears in January.
Mein Kampf, whose two volumes appeared first in 1925 and 1927, was started while Hitler was jailed for trying to gain power in a putsch in November 1923. Accordingly, it is a hodgepodge of personal memory and justification of failure, a collation of maudlin nationalism and serious literature, woven into a tract that shows in part how Hitler forged his National Socialist creed and, over time, the first popular mass party of 20th-century Germany, the two men said.
The book has a special layout, with Hitler’s original text on the upper right page of a two-page spread, coupled with small notes on grammatical and other variations among editions published during Hitler’s lifetime and, on the left-hand page, larger comments giving context.
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