Defusing ‘Mein Kampf’: With the Notorious Book’s Copyright to Expire, Germany Wants to Eradicate Its Ideological Poison
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Adolf Hitler’s rambling magnum opus, Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) is considered a blueprint of the radical nationalist, pungently anti-Semitic vision that he would put into practice when the Nazis captured power in Germany, in 1933. It reflects his thinking so accurately that one German historian describes the book as “direct access to Hitler’s brain.”
In fact, the book’s contents were considered potent and infectious enough that the postwar administration in Allied-occupied Germany banned its publication, a prohibition that German authorities maintained, and which is to remain in place until the end of 2015, when the copyright expires. What happens then is the object of intense discussion and soul-searching in Germany, where, 67 years after the war’s end, freedom of speech is still curtailed when it promotes Nazi ideology.
Hitler wrote most of Mein Kampf in 1924, during his incarceration for his role in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, when he and his followers tried to seize power in southern Germany. One of his motives for writing the book was to use the royalties to pay off his legal fees. It was originally thought that Hitler dictated it to his prison mate and early follower, Rudolf Hess. But recent research concludes that Hitler typed it himself in his cell on a portable typewriter, and then later dictated further parts to a publisher.
The tome is a 700-page, two-volume monstrosity, the first edition of which came out in 1925. Though the book contains autobiographical information and was used as a basis for the Nazi Party’s political programs, it is written in the agitprop style of a political pamphlet. During the Weimar Republic years, the book was a best seller and the subject of fervent debate.
Hitler conceived Mein Kampf as a call to a völkisch nationalist alternative not only to Marxism and social democracy, but also to parliamentary democracy, monarchy, and the church. He describes international Jewry as a force committed to a global conspiracy to dominate the world and reduce Germans to their underlings. Using the classic anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he asserts that rootless, cosmopolitan Jews were behind Bolshevism as well as American-style capitalism. Hitler’s tract calls for Germany’s rearmament, the annexation of Austria, the rejection of the Versailles peace treaty, and the necessity of a Rassenkrieg (racial war) to win Lebensraum (living space) for Germans in eastern Europe.