A couple of months ago, Amazon India’s 11th best-selling book was Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf . A rambling, racist Nazi screed which evokes fear and loathing, it has also been translated into several Indian languages. Indian publishing companies have to order constant reprints of the so-called “best-seller” to keep up with the demand.
However, fascination for the book is not just in India but all over the world, where it is readily available.
Though it has never been officially banned, unsurprisingly, no new edition of Mein Kampf has been allowed in German since the end of the Second World War. For the last seven or so decades, the state of Bavaria, which holds the copyright, has prevented its publication. The Bavarian state library in fact vets every request to see copies of the book, which are kept in a ‘poison cabinet’.
“This book is too dangerous for the general public,” Florian Sepp, the Bavarian state library historian, warned recently.
Now, Mein Kampf is to be republished in the original German for the first time in 70 years. When its copyright runs out end of this year, the Institute of Contemporary History (IFZ), a government-funded research institution, is publishing a new edition. Anyone looking to get their hands on a copy, however, should be warned: it’s likely to be priced at several hundred euros, and will run to over 2,000 pages, more than half of them critical notes exposing the flaws in Hitler’s thinking.
Back in 1925, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf , his publishers’ first reaction to the finished draft was disappointment. Hitler rambled about everything from eugenics, politics and race theory to movies and comics. A full 10 pages were devoted to the problem of syphilis.
In its first year of publication, it sold only 9,473 copies, and sales fell to just 3,015 copies in 1928. But by 1932, when Hitler was on the verge of power, Mein Kampf sold over 90,000 copies in a year, and sales jumped to over a million in 1933, when he became Chancellor of Germany.
Subsequent huge sales were boosted by the fact it became the done thing to have a copy of this book in the house in Nazi Germany. Indeed, Mein Kampf became Germany’s standard wedding gift, in fancy editions with the title in gold leaf.
But the book that was taking Germany by storm was toxic and dangerous. Distinguished historian William L. Shirer described Mein Kampf as the “blueprint of the Third Reich” and wrote that “the barbaric New Order which Hitler inflicted on conquered Europe in the triumphant years between 1939 and 1945 is set down in all its appalling crudity”.
There are moments that foreshadow the horrors of the Holocaust that were to follow, as the Nazis under Hitler set about systematically murdering six million of Europe’s Jews, gassing men, women and children to death.
In a particularly chilling passage of Mein Kampf , Hitler wrote of the First World War: “If at the beginning of the war and during the war, 12 or 15 thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain”.
Yet, it’s not just in India that the racist screed is readily available. It can be found around the world in translation, and remains curiously popular, despite its notoriously unreadable style. It was among the top 4,000 bestselling books on Amazon’s U.K. website this week.
“A lot of people get the idea that this book is something dangerous, that you can’t let people read it, but at the same time it is permanently available,” says Dr. Magnus Brechtken, deputy director of the IFZ. “What we’re publishing is an anti-Hitler book. We are defusing the book. By publishing a commentary, we can show where Hitler got his ideas from, and why those ideas don’t work.”
If a German far-Right supporter wants to read Mein Kampf , he can read already read it on the internet, says Dr. Brechtken.
The IFZ previously published annotated editions of Hitler’s speeches, newspaper articles and a second book that remained unpublished in his lifetime. It’s also published works by other notorious Nazi figures, such as Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister.
None of those publications ran into any wide-spread opposition, but it seems a new edition of Mein Kampf is a step too far for many in Germany. Opponents of the book are up in arms, saying the book is as dangerous as ever, especially at a time when the far-right is on the rise across Europe, and Germany has seen mass protests by Pegida, an anti-immigrant and anti-Islam movement.
“This is a book of hatred,” says Levi Salomon, spokesman for Germany’s Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism.
“The result of this book was that millions of people were killed, millions were maltreated, whole areas were overrun with war,” Ludwig Unger, a spokesman for the Bavarian Ministry of Education and Culture, has said.
The strange thing is Mein Kampf has always been available in bookshops in Germany. While there may have been no new editions, there has never been any ban on second-hand copies, and the huge number sold in Hitler’s lifetime means there are still plenty around. And, in the Internet age, the full German text can be found at the click of a button. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while at a crossroads in his life. After the collapse of his first attempt to seize power, in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler was put on trial. It was supposed to be a public humiliation that would have put paid to his pretensions to power. But somehow Hitler turned it on its head. He cross-examined witnesses himself, and used the court as a stage to make long political speeches depicting himself as a hero and martyr for a cause. Instead of crushing him, the trial made him famous worldwide.
He was sent to jail all the same, and Mein Kampf was his attempt to keep the ball of his newfound fame rolling. He was, however, curiously inept when it came to writing. He wanted to call the book Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice , but his publisher came to his rescue and changed the name to Mein Kampf , or My Struggle .
The rest of the book was no more inspired. The annotations in the new edition make it clear there were very few original ideas in the book. Hitler just appropriated racist and anti-Semitic ideas that were already popular at the time.
“It’s why he was successful. People could connect to him,” Dr. Brechtkel says. “They saw in him someone who could fulfil their ideas.”
In fact, despite the horror at the Mein Kampf ’s return to German bookshelves, historians have long cast doubt on how much impact the book really had on Hitler’s rise to power. But for many of Europe’s Jews, even with anti-Nazi annotations, a new edition of Mein Kampf is unacceptable.“It’s a racist book and there is no reason for publishing it,” says Salomon. “This is not a question of freedom of speech. It’s a question of hatred.”
