The decision to pick up an annotated copy of Mein Kampf, which hit German bookstores Friday for the first time since Hitler died 70 years ago, is not something Holger Wiess takes lightly.
Over the years, Bavaria’s state finance ministry had used its copyright on the book to prevent the publication of new editions. The book wasn’t banned in Germany, though, and could be found online, in secondhand bookshops and in libraries.
The new edition is 1,948 pages, roughly double the original, and sets Hitler’s text amid extensive comments by historians that are meant to contradict and deflate his writing.
But these ideas never went away. Digital versions of the book have been available in Germany online, in libraries, and in antiquarian bookstores. Nationalist and neo-Nazi groups have prospered throughout the world, and certainly not just among those who have read it. Nonetheless, some leaders of Bavaria and Germany’s Jewish community have expressed understandable concern and vigilance about the wider circulation that plain, unannotated versions of the book will likely achieve.
Interestingly, nobody on either side of the “Mein Kampf” debate is framing this as a conflict between free speech and hate speech. Everyone recognizes that it is hate speech, pure and simple, and Germany, like many other Western countries, has laws prohibiting speech that advocates national, racial or religious hatred that incites discrimination, hostility or violence. Germans learned from their history, and unlike in the U.S., hate speech — regardless of whether or not it’s intended to directly incite violence — is not protected. Rather, the question is whether the educational value of the annotations in the IfZ’s edition will outweigh the potential harm of giving Hitler’s words broader exposure, even with tightly controlled distribution.
But he plans on reading the 2,000-page annotated “Hitler, Mein Kampf: A Critical Edition” because he sees a chance to glean new insights. “You get a chance to learn more about that history, to understand it’s not the truth,” he says.
The expiration of the copyright on Mein Kampf – “My Struggle” – comes as France moved last week to declassify documents from its disgraced Vichy era of Nazi collaboration, and as reprints of Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl” stirred controversy. The French publisher Fayard has tentative plans to republish their own annotated version of Mein Kampf in 2018.
Some, especially Jewish groups, have voiced fear that these documents could not have re-emerged at a worse time, with the rise of nationalist and populist parties whose rhetoric has echoed some of the demagoguery of pre-war Europe. But many Europeans see the unearthing of documents and the fresh analysis as coming at exactly the right time.
Germany’s main Jewish group, the Central Council of Jews, said it has no objections to the critical edition but strongly supports ongoing efforts to prevent any new “Mein Kampf” without annotations. Its president, Josef Schuster, said he hopes the critical edition will “contribute to debunking Hitler’s inhuman ideology and counteracting anti-Semitism.”
Jewish opinion has been divided, however. One of Schuster’s predecessors, Charlotte Knobloch, has said she worries the new edition will simply awaken interest in the original, not the commentary.
The president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, said it’s right to study the book, but he underlined his opposition to a new edition.
“I don’t see the need for a critical edition,” he said. “Unlike other works that truly deserve to be republished as annotated editions, ‘Mein Kampf’ does not. Already, academics, historians and the wider public have easy access to this text.”
1939: What Hitler Wants
Hitler wrote “Mein Kampf” — or “My Struggle” — after he was jailed following the failed 1923 coup attempt known as the Beer Hall Putsch. The rambling tome set out his ultranationalist, anti-Semitic and anti-communist ideology, which would culminate in the Holocaust and a war of conquest in Europe. It is considered an important source for understanding the history of the Nazi regime.
“The problem with this book is that it isn’t just a historical source — it’s also a symbol,” said Christian Hartmann, who led the team putting together the annotated edition. “And our idea was to lay bare this symbol once and for all.”
Millions of copies were printed after the Nazis took power in 1933, and it was published after the war in several other countries.
Both British and American publishers are presently wrangling over the right to publish an unexpurgated edition of “Mein Kampf.” Because that book is supposed to contain the entire program of the Nazi party, its contents are today, more than ever, of vital importance. Miss Lorimer, a seasoned newspaper correspondent, has in “What Hitler Wants” gotten around the legal problem, and presents a condensation of the full Nazi philosophy, theory, practice and aims as expressed in the uncut “Mein Kampf” and from the written and spoken words of Herr Hitler himself. Step by step, she demonstrates that the progress of the Third Reich has conformed with startling fidelity to the progress as outlined by the Fuehrer more than a decade ago in Landsberg prison. The unrealized claims, still only in the pages of “Mein Kampf,” are presented in English exactly as Hitler conceived them.
Mein Kampf, which was penned during Hitler’s stint in jail in Bavaria in the 1920s after a failed coup, reached millions of readers after the Nazis took power in 1933. After his death, the Allies handed the copyright to the state of Bavaria, which banned its republication. Now they no longer can, under European copyright law that stipulates that a work becomes part of public domain 70 years after the death of an author.
The majority of Germans – three out of five – aren’t worried about it stoking far-right flames, according to a recent survey by YouGov. More divided have been victims and survivors of the Third Reich, though Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has backed an annotated version for the purpose of “knowledge.”
The Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, which unveiled the new work today, has long argued that the copyright ban itself has done little to curb access to Nazi ideology. Old versions of Mein Kampf are available at many bookstores and online. “What is missing is a critical edition of this,” says Magnus Brechtken, deputy director of the institute.
He says the new edition has helped counter new threats to democracy. The government has relied on their testimony, he says, in an effort to outlaw the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) on the basis that it resembles rhetoric of National Socialism prior to 1945. “You can only prove this and show this if you take historic texts like Mein Kampf and analyze them, see where it comes from, what it means,” he says. “That gives you the opportunity as a democracy to fight against people that are openly attacking democracy.”
Not everyone is convinced. Henry, a bookstore customer in Cologne who gave only his first name, says that he was annoyed to hear that such a book could be published again. His uncle asked him to look for a copy for him and bring it on a visit. He refused, saying he didn’t want anything to do with “that psychopath.”
Such sensitivities have surfaced in France, too, which recently released 200,000 documents from the Vichy regime. Opening up the documents has brought back feelings of being conquered, much as the Germans are dealing with their legacy of having conquered.
“There is a feeling of fear in France that certain things will come out. There is a national embarrassment,” says Morin. “The memory of this war remains a burning issue.”
Still, there is a sense that with the passing of time, there is less risk of offending those who might have lived – or ruled – during the Vichy period. “The political class of today is so distanced from that post-war era,” says Annette Vierwioka, a French historian and Holocaust specialist. “The weight of this history isn’t as heavy as it was before.”
The access to Mein Kampf and Vichy documents comes as another copyright ownership ban is brewing – over whether Anne Frank or her father owns the rights to Anne Frank’s Diary. The Anne Frank Foundation set up by Otto Frank argues that he does, so it’s still protected. But Olivier Ertzscheid, a professor of digital culture at the University of Nantes in France who published the diary online Jan. 1, arguing that the copyright has expired, says that his battle mirrors that of those fighting to preserve and understand the legacy of the era.
However, he said it was important to him to stock the annotated edition — priced at 59 euros ($64) — because “it takes apart all Hitler’s lies, propaganda tricks and rhetorical tricks with 3,500 footnotes, so that in the end not much is left of them.”