Demystifying Hitler�s �Mein Kampf�
Martin Doerry and Klaus Wiegrefe
For the first time since 1945, Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf is available for sale in Germany. With a new annotated edition, Historians hope to defuse the Nazi-era bestseller. Even after seven decades, it remains a dangerous proposition.
That damned book! The minister feels a need to drink something spicy. Ludwig Spaenle reaches for a bottle of Tabasco, pours a generous amount into a glass of vegetable juice and takes a large gulp. Mein Kampf? Yes, he says, its certainly a unique story.
He initially welcomed the new edition of Adolf Hitlers book, he says, and the Bavarian state parliament even approved a budget of 500,000 ($542,000) for the project, led by the Munich Institute of Contemporary History. But then, says Spaenle, he accompanied the Bavarian governor on a trip to Israel in September 2012. And after that, opinions changed, he explains. Period.
Spaenle, the Bavarian Minister of Education and Science, pours another serving of vegetable juice and Tabasco into his glass and takes another large gulp. What happened in Jerusalem? Well, he says, there were the victims rights groups, there were Israeli cabinet ministers and there were many meetings. After that, it was clear that it just wouldnt do. A new edition of Mein Kampf with the coat of arms of the State of Bavaria on the front cover? No one in Israel would have understood such a thing.
Spaenle takes another sip and spends a moment staring into space in his office, enormous even by Bavarian standards. It is an evening in November 2015 and the minister, a Baroque figure, is sitting -- or rather, holding court -- on his sofa, with his sleeves rolled up, surrounded by dark oil paintings on the walls and a large photo of former Bavarian Governor Franz Josef Strauss on his desk.
This book, the victims, academia -- somehow it all refused to fit together. And it was up to him, Spaenle, to solve the problem without spoiling his relationship with his boss, current Bavarian Governor Horst Seehofer.
On Dec 11, 2013, a day after Seehofer had announced Bavarias withdrawal from the project, Spaenle wrote a rather sly press release: Out of respect for the victims of the Holocaust, he wrote, he too was opposed to the publication of an academic edition of this disgraceful book on assignment from the Free State of Bavaria. But then he added, diplomatically: This will not affect the freedom of academia to address the issues it deems necessary.
Sold Out
In other words, the Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ) was free to continue working on the project. Thestate government was not asking the IfZ to pay back the subsidy, instead the funding was declared to be a non-project-specific grant. The language allowed Spaenle to successfully evade the problem.
Now, more than two years later, the IfZ edition has actually been published. And just days after it appeared in bookstores last week, the first print run of 4,000 copies was sold out. IfZ is now starting a second, much larger run of the two-volume, 1,948-page work. The new edition includes the complete original text of Mein Kampf, together with more than 3,500 astute annotations. The only thing missing is the Bavarian coat of arms on its gray cover. To defuse any suspicions of commercial interest, the edition is being published by the IfZs in-house imprint.
Nevertheless, the project has raised concerns, even in the academic world. Wolfgang Benz, a Berlin expert on anti-Semitism, cannot imagine that the new edition will offer anything new, and Jeremy Adler, a professor of German in London, even tried to stop the edition last Thursday. Otherwise, he wrote in an angry op-ed in Sddeutsche Zeitung, a disgraceful work would gain a dignity that we associate with Homer and Plato, the Bible and the Talmud.
Adler does admit, however, that he rendered his verdict without access to the new text. Which is rather bold. For if he had had the opportunity to peruse the IfZ edition, he would most likely have reached a different conclusion. In fact, this edition is one of the most important Hitler-research works to be printed in years. It will satisfy experts in the field and provide historically interested laypersons with a wealth of new insights.
It is likely that IfZ historians have never before attracted this much public attention. For months, journalists, diplomats and politicians besieged the academics at their offices in a concrete building on Leonrodstrasse in Munich. Some of their more prominent visitors included Douglas Davidson, the US State Departments Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues, Dan Shaham, the Israeli General Consul in Munich, and members of the Green Partys parliamentary group in the Bavarian State Parliament.
The new edition project was mentioned on South Korean breakfast radio and on the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera. The Italian daily La Stampa and the Spanish newspaper El Pas reported on the project, as did the Tokyo daily Asahi Shimbun and the New York Times. Three German public broadcasters produced documentaries and almost all German newspapers and magazines published lengthy articles on the subject.
The Foundation of the Hitler Myth
Should we have expected anything else? For the last 90 years, Mein Kampf has been treated as a key work of Nazism and, in light of its consequences, can be considered the worlds most dangerous book. It was only during the writing of the tome that Hitler began to believe that he had been chosen, and the book was intended to convey this message to his supporters. Mein Kampf, says historian Ian Kershaw, laid the foundation for the Hitler myth.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler outlined the murderous ideology that dominated his thinking until his 1945 death in the Fhrer bunker in Berlin. With the book, writes Hitler biographer Peter Longerich, Hitler began to consistently connect the space issue with the race issue, that is, the destruction of the Soviet Union with anti-Semitism. In the end, these delusional ideas led to the dual catastrophe of a war of extermination and the Holocaust.
From pogroms to hatred of Communists to his greatest obsession, the war, Hitler revealed in his book what he intended to do, with an openness that was as remarkable as it was nave, write the IfZ historians. In the last relatively free parliamentary election before the war, in March 1933, about 52 percent of Germans voted for Hitler and his coalition. They should have known what the leader of the Nazi Party had in mind.
The first volume of Mein Kampf was published in the summer of 1925 and the second in December 1926. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels called the book a gospel of a new era, while others saw it as the bible of National Socialism. Today critics are no less dramatic in their assessments, calling it a grail of evil and a Pandoras box that would better be left closed forever.
Once it was re-opened, Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Israeli Cultural Society of Munich, warned in the Washington Post, it could no longer be closed. In other words, Knobloch seemed to imply, a republication of Mein Kampf could expose Germany to an uncontrollable threat.
It is a concern shared by many. Indeed, justice and interior ministers from the German states have prepared for the books publication -- because the Munich academics arent the only ones now allowed to publish Mein Kampf. As of Jan. 1, 2016, anyone can publish and sell the book, at least in theory. More than 70 years after the authors death, the copyright, which the Free State of Bavaria held since 1948 and consistently defended, has now expired. Spigel
