Mein Kampf: The world’s most dangerous book?

Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf falls out of copyright in
Germany at the end of 2015. What will happen
when authorities can no longer control its
publication and distribution? A new BBC
programme examines the issues.
“They wanted to replace the Bible.” Whispering in a
hushed room of the Bavarian State Library, rare
books expert Stephan Kellner describes how the
Nazis turned a rambling, largely unreadable screed
– part memoir, part propaganda – into a central
part of the Third Reich’s ideology.
As Mein Kampf comes out of copyright – meaning
that, in theory, anyone could publish their own
editions in Germany – a new programme on BBC
Radio 4 explores what authorities can do about
one of the world’s most notorious books.
According to the producer of Publish or Burn,
which will be broadcast on January 14, it remains
a dangerous text. “The history of Hitler is a history
of underestimating him; and people have
underestimated this book,” says John Murphy,
whose grandfather translated the first unabridged
English language version in 1936.
“There’s a good reason to take it seriously
because it is open to misinterpretation. Even
though Hitler wrote it in the 1920s a lot of what he
said in it, he carried out – if people had paid a bit
more attention to it at the time maybe they would
have recognised the threat.”
Hitler began writing Mein Kampf while in prison for
treason after the failed 1923 ‘Beer Hall’ putsch in
Munich, outlining his racist, anti-Semitic views.
Once he gained power a decade later, the book
became a key Nazi text, with 12m copies printed;
it was given to newly married couples by the state
and gold-leaf editions were displayed prominently
in the homes of senior officials.
At the end of World War Two, when the US Army
seized the Nazis’ publisher Eher Verlag, rights for
Mein Kampf passed to the Bavarian authorities.
They ensured the book was only reprinted in
Germany under special circumstances – but the
expiration of its copyright in December 2015 has
prompted fierce debate on how to curb a
publishing free-for-all.
“The Bavarians have used copyright to control
republication of Mein Kampf but that control is
coming to an end – what happens next?” says
Murphy. “This is still a dangerous book – there
are issues with neo-Nazis, and a danger of people
misinterpreting it if it’s not put into context.”
Chapter and verse
Some question whether anyone would want to
publish it – according to the New Yorker , “It is full
of bombastic, hard-to-follow clauses, historical
minutiae, and tangled ideological threads, and both
neo-Nazis and serious historians tend to avoid it.”
Yet the book has become popular in India with
politicians who have Hindu nationalist leanings. “It
is considered to be a very significant self-help
book,” Atrayee Sen, a lecturer in contemporary
religion and conflict at the university of
Manchester, tells Radio 4. “If you take the element
of anti-Semitism out, it is about a small man who
was in prison who dreamt of conquering the world
and set out to do it.”
The removal of context is one of the fears of those
opposed to republication. In Publish or Burn
Ludwig Unger, spokesman for the Bavarian Ministry
of Education and Culture, says: “The result of this
book was that millions of people were killed,
millions were maltreated, whole areas were overrun
with war. It’s important to keep this in mind and
you can do that when you read certain passages
with appropriate critical historical commentary.”
When the copyright expires, the Institute for
Contemporary History in Munich plans to bring out
a new edition of Mein Kampf that combines the
original text with a running commentary pointing
out omissions and distortions of the truth. Some
victims of the Nazis oppose this approach, and the
Bavarian government withdrew its support for the
Institute after criticism from Holocaust survivors.
Yet suppressing the book might not be the best
tactic – an op-ed in the New York Times argued
that: “The inoculation of a younger generation
against the Nazi bacillus is better served by open
confrontation with Hitler’s words than by keeping
his reviled tract in the shadows of illegality.”
Murphy acknowledges that a global ban on the
book is impossible. “This is more to do with the
Bavarian authorities making a point, rather than
really being able to control it. They have to take a
stand, even if in the modern world it won’t prevent
people getting access.”
Publish or Burn’s presenter Chris Bowlby argues
that symbolic actions still matter. After the
copyright expires, the state plans to prosecute
using the law against incitement to racial hatred.
“From our point of view Hitler’s ideology
corresponds to the definition of incitement,” says
Ludwig Unger. “It’s a dangerous book in the wrong
hands.”