Why is mein kampf banned in germany

At the end of January the IfZ will launch a sixth print run. The book contains critical notes by scholars. The swastika and other Nazi symbols are banned in Germany. The first print run in Germany in was 4, copies. Life of Adolf Hitler. Austria MPs vote to seize Hitler's house.

Himmler diaries show daily Nazi horrors. Living with a Nazi name. The decision to republish the inflammatory book was criticised by Jewish groups. Mein Kampf was originally printed in - eight years before Hitler came to power. It sets out racist ideas that the Nazis put into practice later, including the denigration and oppression of Jews and Slavs.

Some 85, copies of the new edition have sold since then. The publisher, the Institute of Contemporary History of Munich IfZ , said the sixth print run will hit shelves later this month to keep pace with rising demand.

But, IfZ says, history buffs and not neo-Nazis are fueling the sales. The new edition, at 2, pages, is heavily annotated by historians. Nearly 12 million copies of the antisemitic manifesto sold during the rise and fall of the Third Reich between to After the war, the state of Bavaria secured the copyright to Mein Kampf and kept a tight lid on its reprinting and distribution.

But when that copyright expired this year, IfZ decided to publish the new edition. Image by Getty Images.

Author A. J Goldberg. Send to. Add a message. Send me a copy. Did providing a public place for the autobiographical testament of the Nazi dictator, written when he was briefly imprisoned in Bavaria, in the nineteen-twenties, in some way legitimize it, people asked, even if the text was surrounded by a trench work of scholarly addenda designed to italicize its lies and manias?

A good opposing case can be made on similarly symbolic grounds: that making it public in Germany is a way of robbing it of the glamour of the forbidden. However that may be, the striking thing about the text as a text is that it is not so much diabolical or sinister as creepy. It is the last book in the world that you would expect a nascent Fascist dictator to write. Most of us—and most politicians in particular, even those who belong to extremist movements—try to draw a reasonably charismatic picture of our histories and ourselves.

We want to look appealing. An evil force may emerge and temporarily defeat the narrator, but that force is usually placed against a childhood of a purer folk existence, now defiled. Hitler, whom we suspect of being an embittered, envious, traumatized loser, presents himself as. The weirdness of this is especially evident in the earlier autobiographical chapters.

His resentments are ever-present. His father was dense, mean, unforgiving, and opaque. I went one step further and declared that if that was the case I would stop studying altogether. The petty rancor and unassuaged disappointments of a resentment-filled life burn on every page, in ways one would think might be more demoralizing than inspiring to potential followers.