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'Mein Kampf' To Be Republished In Germany
Hugh Pickens writes "Jacob Heilbrunn reports in The Atlantic that Germany is taking a new step toward what is often called 'normalization' as the state of Bavaria has announced that in 2015 it will publish Hitler's Mein Kampf, banned in Germany since World War II. In announcing the publication of the book, Bavarian finance minister Markus Soeder says that he wants to contribute to the 'demystification' of it. In 2015, the Bavarian state's copyright to the book will expire and the idea is to publish a scholarly version that will help stem its appeal for commercial publishers. The book is not banned by law in Germany, but Bavaria has used ownership of the copyright to prevent publication of German editions since 1945. Copyright restrictions stop at the end of 2015, 70 years after Hitler's death. By publishing in 2015 before the expiry of the copyright, Bavaria hopes to make future German editions as 'commercially unattractive' as possible. 'We want to make clear what nonsense is in there,' says Soeder and to show 'what a worldwide catastrophe this dangerous body of thought led to.'"
The current English edition is actually peppered with footnotes calling out every time Hitler lies or exaggerates. It's like a side by side refutation.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
They should have started demystifying it 67 years ago.....
You know who else liked to suppress books they considered dangerous or "un-German?" The Nazis.
Seriously, you don't even need annotations. Everyone with enough brain cells to rub together will start rolling their eyes in the first chapter already.
Hitler reinterpreted his whole life to match his ideology to such a degree it just becomes hilariously stupid to read... and boring, by the way.
And frankly, those who lack the necessary brain power to recognize the inherent worth (or lack thereof) of the book will not be dissuaded by annotations, true as they may be.
It wasn't required reading and it wasn't exactly banned either - the copyright was state-owned and Bavaria simply decided not to print or license it. We did read some excerpts in history class - subjecting anyone to slouch through the whole mess would probably be considered abuse. Hitler couldn't write for shit...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It's not so much that Germany has done a good job about that, but the US did an excellent job of reeducating Germans after the Second World War. They treated the general population fairly and helped them survive. But they also had a reeducation scheme in which they forced groups of ordinary people to look at piles of dead bodies found at concentration camps, etc.
The Soviet Union, in contrast, had a different scheme that did not work. Essentially it amounted to drawing as much profit from the country as possible and torturing random people. This is why nazism is very strong in the east of Germany even today, long after reunification.
Unfortunately, the US seems to have lost the knowledge of how to deal with a conquered nation. In Iraq, for example, they behaved essentially like the Soviet Union did in East Germany.
the point of godwin's law is to point out the essential wrongness of comparing someone's opinion to something hitler or a nazi would do. it's just derails an argument into hysteria and absurdity
however if someone were to get really upset here and yell and scream that what the bavarian government is doing here is something hitler or a nazi would do... well, yeah
and i just learned a great phrase: "Reductio ad Hitlerum"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum
which sounds like a spell voldemort would cast
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Federal Republic is the successor to the Weimar Republic, so the state was not "destroyed". Apparently, when an estate goes to the state, it goes to the state (Bundesland) where the deceased was last registered to live, not Germany; Hitler was registered as living in Munich. That's why it's Bavaria.
If the book had been readily available, there would be fewer neo-nazis in Germany.
I've read it (my parents own a copy, from their grandparents, as Mein Kampf was regularily given as presents at weddings, etc.). It's interesting in parts and revolting in most. It's also pretty badly written. As an author, Hitler was much worse than as a speaker.
There was a comedian here in Germany, of turkish origin, who read from Mein Kampf for school classes and other audiences. He got attacked pretty badly, but in every discussion, he leaves his critics in the dust with his wit and intelligence. In one, he told a former MinisterprÃsident (our equivalent of american governors) that her anti-nazi initiatives had pretty much no effect whatsoever on the youth, because the young people distrust authoritarian stuff that's being forced down their throats. But his readings had a profound effect. Oh and also, the neo-nazis hated him for it, up to death threats.
You can not resolve history by hiding it, only by discussing it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The mere fact that a book written by someone nearly 70 years ago is still under copyright is ridiculous
Count on Slashdot to turn a story about naziism into an anti-copyright rant.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
At this point in history, it is bound to be more enlightening than dangerous.
My high school education in the subject of Nazi Germany was likely more intellectual than most because I had a teacher who was brave enough to stand up and claim that the holocaust wasn't the most important feature of the 20th century. Instead, that teacher claimed, the genocides that came afterwards should play a stronger role in history courses because they are both more contemporary (thus more relevant) and demonstrate how society needs to make a much more concerted effort to learn from the mistakes of our past.
The publication of Mein Kampf in Germany at this stage of history is important for a couple of reasons. One is that access to primary sources will allow the general population to more directly learn what the mistakesh of Nazi Germany were. But this will only work out because we have had a handful of generations to sort out why such policies represent an unforgivable evil. Both reasons are essential, because we need both information and a temporal/emotional distance to evaluate things rationally.
Publishing this work in this day in age isn't an apology to the Nazis. It does not represent a forgiveness due to social relativism, nor any other extremist ideology. It simply acknowledges that the only way to learn from the past is to understand the past from their perspective.
The word is "foreword", not "forward".
Posted anonymously on account of being a grammar nazi (pun not intended).
It's a shame that a big part of the reason for it being banned in Germany was the statement that Nazi germany was a very efficient system of government. That's something that really needs repeating, every time someone proposes a law aimed at increasing the efficiency of their government...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Definitely not required reading in school. Would be no point in doing that anyway, since the whole book is just crap, nothing to learn there except that Hitler was not good at writing :-) Maybe some excerpts are used in history class somewhere to show how delusional Hitler was.
The book could not be bought anywhere because of the mentioned copyright, but it never was any problem getting your hands on an old version of it - basically every household back then in Germany had one, and many of those books survived to this day on some grandma's / grandpa's bookshelf. I know that my grandmother had one (she said that most people threw theirs away after the war, but she kept hers because it had an autograph in it), I think my uncle has it now.
It already is! Once again the Net sneaks up on our old school habits! "(Blah blah blah copyright runs out in 2015 blah blah blah)". Remember that thing called countries, and how they have different laws? (Up until the US "fixes" that anyway!) Well, for now Australia's copyright laws are a lot shorter than the US, so Gutenberg Australia has some editions of texts that are still locked in copyright elsewhere. Here is Gutenberg Australia's copy of Mein Kampf, so have at it!
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt
Oh wait, there is this eerie clause:
http://gutenberg.net.au/submissions.html
"Of course, works may remain copyrighted in other countries. One cannot legally download or read books posted at Project Gutenbrg of Australia if one is in a country where copyright protections extend more than 50 years past an author's death. The author's estate and publishers still retain their legal and moral rights to oversee the work in those countries."
So, I guess you'd better not follow that link. Isn't copyright wonderful.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The mere fact that a book written by someone nearly 70 years ago is still under copyright is ridiculous
Count on Slashdot to turn a story about naziism into an anti-copyright rant.
The story is a copyright story. The book hasn't been banned. The book has simply not been published, because the people sitting on the copyright refused to publish it. The reason it is now about to be published is because the copyright is finally expiring.
How much more deserving can a story be of triggering anti-copyright rants than when copyright is explicitly and directly used to enforce censorship?
May we live long and die out
Unfortunately, the US seems to have lost the knowledge of how to deal with a conquered nation.
Part of the problem is that the US probably didn't have that knowledge in the first place - at least not to the extent it's commonly thought of today. Most of us probably think that after the end of WWII, Germans basically accepted the new government and went back to work. Unfortunately that's a propaganda legend of sorts - there was actually a lot of guerrilla fighting, murdering "collaborators", attacking allied troops and destroying infrastructure. However it was decided not to give these events any press in order not to encourage the resistance. Which made a lot of sense at the time.
The result today is that we have a distorted view of the way things went in Germany, and that may have contributed to the ill-fated decision to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is a documentary available on youtube about the German "Werwolfs". It's quite an eye opener.
Of course another problem of applying the "German approach" to Iraq, is that the Germans had genuinely done something wrong, and you could appeal to human morals as part of an occupation strategy. That doesn't work in Iraq, because the criminal action in this war was on the US side. In Afghanistan that angle would be possible, but nobody actually voted for Bin Laden or the Taliban, so it's hard to claim that an ordinary citizen had any involvement in that.
It might have helped if similar education had been provided for Americans - perhaps it would have changed the approach to engage the population with more humility "we messed up but we need to fix the situation now". But generally US politicians are too afraid to tell the population that the US can be morally wrong, too.
erste Antwort, keine Erstegepostungmittlestoff.
Oh to read "Mein Kampf" in the original Deutsch.
Although I do not agree with all his philosophies and methods, I recognize the brilliance of Corporal Schicklgruber in attaining Germanys highest post.
I wonder at his further being able to bend an unsuspecting country and then a continent to his will.
But, the advent of the Volkswagon is proof that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
His relationship with Henry Ford, noteworthy.
His love of children, extraordinary. http://adolfhitlerbestpictures.blogspot.com/2009/12/adolf-hitler-pictures-with-children.html
We all know Hitler hated Jews. Germany blamed Jews for the losses of WW1, as they cut the flow of money from their banks. It wasn't hard to demonize them, but probably should've been done from the perspective that they were Bankers, not Jews. That's like hating ICEEs because Muslims seem to own 7-11 corp.
They are right, it could happen anywhere and people should see the truth. I don't think that a bunch of annotations from zealous anti-Nazis will help any more than zealous anti-drug messages have worked in America. So we should just print , as is.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Yeah, what kind of backword thinking is that?
Posted anonymously on account of being a pedantic semite.
I have to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the German approach to presenting the horrors of WWII. Last Christmas I visited the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich. All the material presented there went extremely over the top to paint the Nazis as inhuman monsters that were far distanced from any sane person. But what this totally missed is that the horror of the Holocaust was that it was completely human. The vast majority of the Nazis were everyday people like you an me, and that's what makes it mindbogglingly terrible.
In contrast you have the Holocaust exhibit at the British Imperial War Museum. The whole first section is very clearly focused on the on the economic and political conditions that led to the rise of the Nazis. Through the propoganda and information presented in that exhibit you come to understand how otherwise normal people came to participate in, sanction, or at least turn a blind eye to, one of the worst attrocities in modern history. I believe that only by dissecting this information and understanding this "flaw" of human nature can we really prevent such terrible things from happening again. Mein Kampf should have been repuplished years ago for exactly this reason.
I'll get hate for saying this but WTF,lets be honest, if you wanna go by sheer numbers Hitler hated Ruskies even more than Jews but if you look at the man's record pretty much anyone not Aryan that didn't think EXACTLY like him got put on his shit list. Lets see...Poles, Jews, Russian, Gypsy, gay, communists...did I leave anybody out? lets face it the guy really wasn't THAT picky when it came to killing and if you look at those throughout history that racked up huge body counts that's something they all had in common. While its true he didn't like Jews once WWII started not liking someone wasn't really a prerequisite, he slaughtered for pretty much any old reason.
Personally I'm for printing it,not because I thought the man had any great insight, far from it and one could argue that WWII was pretty much a war with all the planning of throwing darts at a dartboard without any real thought involved on Germany's part (attacking Russia without ANY winter gear? batshit much?) but because i'm a strong believer on freedom of thought, be it the little red book or Mein Kampf or the supposed "pro pedo" book. To be frightened of words on a page is to be frightened of thought and I personally find that even more scary. If you truly fear words on a page because you think they are gonna suddenly affect large numbers of your populace? then maybe, just throwing this out there, you should teach your people to think for themselves and instead of trying to hide the words make a decent counterargument instead?
My grandfather fought in WWII and actually liberated one of the camps in Poland, not one of the big names but it was horrifying none the less, and one of the last things he taught me was not to fear words and ideas as he actually supported the Illinois Nazis right to march, even though he had suffered so much in the war and ended it with a wall dropped on him by a Werwulf squad. He said "that's what made us different, we let people speak, even if we don't agree" and I always took those and his memories he shared of that time to heart. so when i saw some neo Nazis on a street corner in Dallas in the late 80s I didn't join the protesters shouting dirty names at them, I simply bought a large piece of posterboard and made up a sign that said "My grandfather liberated one of the camps, ask me about it" and told his story, of seeing children piled like cordwood, of seeing people so starved one couldn't tell male from female, of being told NOT to feed them because they had been starved so long rich GI rations would throw their frail bodies into shock and of watching in horror because one of the other men did exactly that because he felt pity and the person went into convulsions and died. He said that was the closest he ever got to committing war crimes as he and his men were ready to execute those Nazis on the spot until one of the prisoners told them these were just some flunky recruits brought in while the monsters snuck away and they had actually been treated well by the recruits.
Well needless to say all those nasty names didn't phase those Nazis but what DID phase them was me. They even went so far as to actually complain to a cop standing there who snickered and said "you have the right to speak and so does he" and when they saw I wouldn't go away they packed up and left. It is ALWAYS better not to sweep such things under the rug but to fight it with the truth. By keeping it hidden and banned since the Americans left Germany has simply allowed those groups to grow when a much better solution would have been to simply fight them with the reality of the past IMHO.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Lots of people hate the Jews for their work in international banking. But they ended up in banking, a soiled business, because in the 1200s it was forbidden to christians and muslims by their religions.
If you're pissed about the 'dirty Jew bankers' blame your own stupid theologies for cutting you out of the action. Churches like to keep the flock poor; makes them obedient.
This is a wonderful post. But what you say at the end about Germany "...keeping it hidden and banned since Americans left Germany...' may be true in the sense that Hitler/Nazi literature/paraphernalia became banned, but the facts regarding the atrocities committed by that regime were definitely not hidden. As I went through the German school system in the '70s, I recall vividly the compulsory viewing of documentaries that went into quite graphic details on what went on in the concentration camps. I actually feel that the government went overboard in this regard - a whole generation of Germans grew up with this enormous guilt complex that, IMHO, negatively impacted Germany's subsequent role in various post-war European organizations.
I quite agree. I don't think there's any inherent flaw in character of the German people. I find it a little queer that the question can even be asked with a straight face, much less answered affirmatively three-to-one.
Let me go way out on an idealistic limb here, though: I'd like to think that reflection on the horrors of the past can help lessen horrors of the present and future. Even if the conclusions reached by those reflecting are often little nonsensical. At any rate, it certainly better than whitewashing atrocities, or sweeping them under the rug.
Germans have been held to task for WWII's military aggression, xenophobia, and genocide. Other nations, even those with atrocities of similar scale (though talking about the "scale" of genocide seems petty), have not. There are still plenty of war-waging bullys in the world, but Germany's not among them. I'm not trying to say that Germany's all rainbows and butterflies, we know better -- plenty of racial problems, etc. But the general disinclination towards war and violence is real, and if it takes a guilt complex, so be it.
(Oh, and I can second the recommendation for Die Welle!)
Christopher Columbus gets a national holiday in the U.S. because he was too stupid to find India. He didn't prove that the Earth was round, nor did he beat Leif Ericson and John Cabot to North America. We push aside the negativity of indigenous genocide so that we can celebrate "European Accomplishment" instead. Well then, I propose that we institute a Hitler Day. Think about it... Hitler pushed for the creation of Volkswagen and the Autobahn. His leadership of Germany led to jet propulsion, significant advances in rocket telemetry, and laid the foundation for genetic engineering. Why not celebrate his bona fide accomplishments on behalf of humanity rather than "dwelling" so persistently on the genocidal by-products of his policies?
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune