In fact: What Mein Kampf tells us about the now and here

Adolf Hitler’s manifesto has been a reliable bestseller in several countries. In India, Jaico Books has kept it in print since 1988, and is believed to have sold lakhs of copies.

Mein Kampf

At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, the German state of Bavaria’s copyright on Mein Kampf will run out. But the book which lit the fuse for World War II will not be let out unchaperoned in Germany, which has neo-Nazi problems and has not allowed an edition to be published since the global conflict. Only a heavily annotated critical edition will be allowed out into the wild. It is being produced by the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich (www.ifz-muenchen.de), which was incorporated at the urging of the Allies after the War to separate history from propaganda.

Elsewhere, Adolf Hitler’s manifesto has been a reliable bestseller in several countries. In India, Jaico Books has kept it in print since 1988, and is believed to have sold lakhs of copies. Amazon India lists more than five print editions easier on the pocket than a cup of coffee. Free etexts are available from the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Greatwar.nl and the specifically focused downloadmeinkampf.org, among dozens of resources. These editions offer the original, which Hitler dictated to Rudolf Hess in 1924 while serving a sentence for the failed Beer Hall Putsch. They expose the reader only to the theory of hate, exclusion and genocide which provided the intellectual basis of the Third Reich, without the benefit of historical context and contemporary political theory. Since the bald text may reinforce extremist prejudices, the release of a scholarly critical edition is significant.

Mein Kampf was a prescription to hell for Germany, which would be so devastated by a war of its own making that housewives used Deutschmarks to light kitchen fires. And in 1942, it led to the Wannsee Protocol, a document scribbled up by 15 of the leading figures of the Third Reich, led by Kristallnacht pogrom organiser Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust. Popularly known as the Final Solution, it is inhuman in its statistical detail, estimating the proportion of Jews who would succumb to exposure, malnutrition, disease and other incidental causes in the course of forced marches and hard labour, and how many would be left for industrial-scale concentration camps to ‘process’. The Wannsee lake by the villa where the protocol was drafted now hosts Berlin’s popular nudist beach.

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The Institute of Contemporary History has published the diaries of Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, he who preferred gunmetal over butter. Good practice for taking on Mein Kampf, which consciously positions itself as a rebuttal to the left, which Hitler accuses of trying to own the public discourse. In Chapter VI, he envied the ease with which Marxist Socialists wielded propaganda: “…this art was practically unknown to our bourgeois parties… Had we any propaganda at all? Alas, I can reply only in the negative.”

Mein Kampf sought to correct this perceived imbalance. This is one of the interesting parallels which the book offers with contemporary Indian politics, where the right presents itself as the victim of left-wing academic and media propaganda. There are others, which would be of interest and amusement to careful readers.

The critical Munich edition of Mein Kampf will be eagerly awaited by intelligent readers since it focuses on “the deconstruction and contextualisation of Hitler’s book”, framing its goal relative to political realities in the 1930s and exploring difficult issues like the social support enjoyed by the Nazis. Specifically, it asks: “given the present state of knowledge, what can we counterpose to Hitler’s innumerable assertions, lies and expressions of intent?” Teachers have been campaigning for the inclusion of Mein Kampf in German high school, to inoculate against extremism. That’s a welcome alternative to banning it.

With half a chuckle, the peevish anger which illuminates Mien Kampf has been attributed to anatomical anxieties. Now, Bild Zeitung, Germany’s leading celebrant of front page toplessness, has reported the rediscovery of a long-lost medical record which confirms that Hitler’s right testicle never descended. All that rage against the world, for this minor shortcoming which is so very easily overlooked in everyday life? And anyway, it was on the wrong side.