Adolf Hitler’s contentious book, Mein Kampf, written in prison after his failed bid for power in 1923, will be on sale as an annotated edition in Germany from January 8.
As of today, January 1, Mein Kampf is a book just like any other, in terms of its legal status as publication of the work will be allowed for the first time in 70 years in Germany, after its copyright expires.
Mein Kampf is arguably one of the most incendiary books ever written. To cite but an example, Volume 1, chapter 11 of Mein Kampf – entitled Race and People – is loaded with hate towards Jews, and features also plans about how to eliminate them.
Germans have to face again the question of how to handle Hitler’s legacy, with obvious fears about the text’s ability to incite Nazi sympathies.Germany has welcomed about a million refugees in recent months, a period which has seen a notable increase in the number of attacks on asylum seekers’ homes.
It is generally accepted that Mein Kampf is poorly written and grammatically sloppy, so much so that wags have dubbed it Sein Krampf, which translates as ‘His Cramp.’ The book became a bestseller after 1933, and sold a total of 12.5m copies.
The Bavarian government has held the rights to it since the war ended, after the Americans handed the rights to the authorities, as Hitler was registered as an inhabitant of Bavaria (Munich.) Bavaria forbade its republication. Some argue that had the authorities been less guarded about the book in the decades since, there would not now be such a prurient fascination with the work’s re-publication..
Mein Kampf has always been available in translations, and online versions are plentiful. At least 20 German-language ones alone are available on the internet. In Germany it has been officially available only in libraries, in antique bookshops, where buyers are sometimes requested to give their names and addresses prior to purchase.
The original book was 1,000 pages long, but the new annotated edition comes in two volumes and is twice as long as the original, with 3,700 annotations.The price is €59 and the initial print run is a mere 4,000 copies
The reappearance of the book has prompted a theatre production, a transgender comedy, hours of chat-show discussion, and a TV documentary called Countdown to the Breaking of a Taboo.Bookshops have assured the German public that they will not be placing it in their windows beside the bestsellers.
Mein Kampf – an earlier edition