There were few takers for “Four-and-a-Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice” when it came out in 1925. The first volume of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was rescued from obscurity by his publisher, who retitled it, and by the Nazi leader’s determination to use his political clout to sell his book.
Mein Kampf barely sold until Hitler became Reich Chancellor in 1933, after which the party pressed the book upon its cadres. It was announced that from May 1, 1936, all newly-wed couples in Germany would receive a free copy, and so the book sold in the manner of the speeches of Chinese premiers, where the massive sales numbers obscure the question of who actually read the book.
When copyright expires three years from now, many fear that there will be far more readers today interested in Hitler’s rambling rants, and his hatred of the Jews. For all these decades, the official holder of the copyright – the state of Bavaria – has refused to publish Mein Kampf. Recently, the Bavarian state announced that it would come out with its own edition, annotated and with forewords that debunk Hitler’s incoherent but deadly arguments.
Perhaps this is the best way to handle a difficult situation. Mein Kampf is often pressed into use by contemporary neo-Nazi groups and other anti-Semitic groups, and instead of suppressing the book, the better way might be to argue against it — or indeed, to make people read every last rambling, over-written page Hitler wrote.
Mein Kampf emerged in a time of growing anti-Semitism. By the 1930s, the National Socialist party was producing pamphlets such as Jew Bells: Up-to-date Satires of Jewish Life. Though the 1940s magazine Der Untermensch (The Sub-Human) is well-known for its specialised portraits of hate, it had its predecessors in unexpected places. In 1933, the official magazine of the German Textile Workers Association, for instance, called for all Jews to be thrown out of the industry.
As is often the case with bad propaganda, Mein Kampf rested most of its arguments on even worse propaganda — the thoroughly discredited hoax known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols reveal a plot by Jews to dominate the world; it was conceived and written by the Okhrana, the Russian secret police. In 1920s Germany, its sales went well beyond 120,000 copies — Hitler envied the success of the Protocols, and made it part of his argument for the extermination of the Jews.
He was well aware of the evidence that the Protocols were a hoax, but he was also aware that the facts were beside the point — the question was whether you could persuade people to believe your version of the story. “What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed,” he wrote in Mein Kampf, dismissing the forgery argument. “And that is what matters.”
Inside Germany, Mein Kampf had its detractors, most memorably Lion Feuchtwanger. Now almost forgotten, Feuchtwanger was perhaps the pre-eminent German novelist of his day. His books, from Jew Suss to Success to The Oppermanns, directly challenged the rise of the Nazi parties; in Success, he caricatured Hitler as “Kutzner”, writing of the orator’s “thin lips with the faint dark moustache and the sleek hair plastered over his head”. After Feuchtwanger’s one-line dismissal of Mein Kampf – “a 140,000 word book with 140,000 mistakes” – Goebbels marked the writer down as an enemy of the regime. He left Germany for France, but had to escape to California when the Vichy government sent him to a detention camp in 1940.
If these histories – the background of anti-Semitism, the public resistance to Mein Kampf – are included with the present edition, the Bavarian government might provide a useful counter-history. There are worse books than Mein Kampf in the canon, and some of them, as the scholar Mary Mills has noted, come from the children’s bookshelves.
Far more successful than Mein Kampf’s desultory initial sales, for instance, was the 1938 children’s tale The Poisonous Mushroom, cheerfully illustrated with pictures of angelic Aryan children and evil, twisted Jews. Gathering mushrooms in the forest, a mother explains to her son that the Jews are “just like poisonous mushrooms … a solitary Jew can kill a whole village”.
Another popular children’s book of the time, with around 100,000 copies in circulation, was Trust Not The Fox —trust no fox on his green heath, and no Jew on his oath. A typical mathematics question in 1936, writes Mills, might read like this: “The Jews are aliens in Germany — in 1933, there were 66,060,000 inhabitants in the German Reich, of whom 499,682 were Jews. What is the per cent of aliens?”
The illustrations for these two books, and a third that compares Jews to vermin, poisonous snakes, tapeworms and the like, are jarringly sweet, brightly coloured, cheerful. Let Mein Kampf come back, briefly, into print; but let the mass of hatred and prejudice printed by the Reich in its trade pamphlets and children’s books remain out of print forever.
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