Dreary prejudice: Mein Kampf is back on the shelves

ARGUMENTS for and against continuing a ban on the publication of Mein Kampf are somewhat theoretical, since the book in which Adolf Hitler snivelled about his early years in Austria before setting out unambiguously his vision for a 1,000-year “Jew-free” empire has never been subjected to a legal ban in Germany. It has been more nuanced than that.

Ownership and re-sale of original copies published between 1925 and 1945 has been permitted, though certainly not encouraged. Instead, Bavaria’s state government, which owns the copyright, has refused to re-publish it and moved swiftly in Germany’s civil courts to stop anyone else doing so.

What should be made of the growing interest in the book since the expiration in 2016 of the 70-year copyright and its re-publication — with scholarly annotation — by Munich’s Institute of Contemporary History?Some 85,000 copies have been sold so far, and a sixth print run is planned for this month. Understandably, fears have been voiced, but there are grounds for thinking they are unwarranted. The book has been kept symbolically under the counter in Germany and Austria – hence its novelty value –but it’s been available in English for decades; copies can be bought today for €6.58 via Amazon. It contains nothing that today’s ambitious racists and tyrants do not already know or believe. Comprising largely rewrites of the anti-Semitic tracts that had been swirling around Austria and Germany since the 1880s, it’s not so much a dangerous book as a dreary museum piece.