Why Germany Is Going to Republish Hitler’s Mein Kampf
It was widely noted during the contretemps over the novelist Gunter Grass’s recent effusions about Israel being a threat to world peace that a divide emerged in Germany. On the one side were the intellectual and political elites that condemned his comments. On the other side was the public, which tended to sympathize with Grass and complain about a “cudgel” being wielded to silence debate about the German past.
Now, Germany is taking a new step toward what is often called “normalization.” The state of Bavaria has announced that in 2015 it will publish Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which first appeared in 1925. A second volume was issued in 1926. The book was written in Landsberg prison, where Hitler was incarcerated after his failed putsch in 1923.
Hitler, you could say, was made in Bavaria. He left Austria and served in the Reichwehr rather than the Austrian army, which he was officially obliged to join. After World War I, Hitler began his rise in Bavaria, where he launched the Beer Hall putsch and where he was fawned over by a number of local aristocrats, including the Bechsteins, who helped finance him and the Nazi Party. Bavaria was a hotbed of right-wing movements in the postwar era, which Hitler welded into the Nazi party. His talent, which no one had accomplished in Germany, was to unify the various splinter groups into a mighty organization. Munich itself was known as the “Haupstadt der Bewegung”—capital of the movement. So Bavaria has much to contemplate and rue when it looks back at the past.