'Mein Kampf' to be republished in Germany 70 years after Hitler's death

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by LovesMacs

I've read this and it's not well written. Put it this way: if World War II hadn't happened, few people would bother reading this book.

I thought that Mein Kampf was a best seller in Germany, and helped propel Hitler to power. Is that not correct?

[Gudy]

Originally Posted by faltradl

You are not right.

It's legal to own it and to read it. And it's legal to buy the old books from antiquarian booksellers. - Or short: The book isn't illegal.

You might want to re-read what I wrote. I certainly didn't claim that private possession, or reading it, was illegal. It isn't. But making it accessible to a minor is, so if you have a copy at home and you have minors in the house, your copy must, under any reasonable interpretation of the law, be kept under lock (hence the "within certain limitations").

As for the trade, sure, selling single, antiquarian copies is not distribution, but selling or otherwise distributing a new print run of non-trivial size would be. And selling to minors is still covered by the law and therefor illegal, as is publishing a freely available e-book version (§130 (2) 2 StGB).

It's §86 StGB which makes the whole situation interesting, because that's where the exemptions for serving for art, science, research, education and reporting come from which motivate the new annotated version.

[beachwanderer]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

I thought that Mein Kampf was a best seller in Germany, and helped propel Hitler to power. Is that not correct?

As always, there ist no simple answer to this.

If one asks family members old enough to remember those times, one will hear that in most towns any newly wed couple got one copy as a gift at the registrars office. (And no, "no one read it." Which is, of course, not true.)

But that was only after the Nazi-Party succeded in local and national elections and finally gained power.

Prior to that there apparently was substancial demand for the book and the profit from the piece helped fund the Nazi-Party directly.

There are studies about the history of this pamphlet by historians, abstracts (in german) of which one can find here or here.

[faltradl]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

I thought that Mein Kampf was a best seller in Germany, and helped propel Hitler to power. Is that not correct?

No, it isn't correct.

Shure it was a bestseller. But not like usual bestsellers. The people didn't buy it in the bookshops like other books. The book was a municipality present to wedding etc.

And no, it didn't help Hitler. Only the fewest people really read the book. (Read some pages and you know why. The writing style ist really poor.) Almost they put it at once to the bookshelf. And at the end of war they burnt it.

When the majority would have read the book perhaps the Nasiz wouldn't have get the power. Hitler wrote about most of his awful ideas. So the people would have known the coming desaster of war. And the crime against the jews.

[doubleshuffle]

As beachwanderer already said, there was substantial demand for the book even before the Third Reich. It seems that over 240,000 copies were sold until January 1933, which isn't exactly shabby. And the claim that no one read the book doesn't seem to be true, since demand in libraries also seems to have been high before 1933.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_K...marer_Republik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_K..._and_royalties

Of course, during the Third Reich the real money grab started. Cities were forced to buy the book as a wedding present to newly married couples (though it seems Frankfurt/Main and Leipzig successfully refused to do so) and , very interestingly, it was made illegal to sell second-hand copies.

[GA Russell]

For a population the size of Germany's ninety years ago, 240,000 sounds like a lot to me, particularly for a politician who had not yet been elected anything.

[doubleshuffle]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

For a population the size of Germany's ninety years ago, 240,000 sounds like a lot to me, particularly for a politician who had not yet been elected anything.

Indeed.

Rest of the post moved to P&R.

[HarryT]

Moderator Notice
Please take political discussions to the P&R forum.

Thank you.

[faltradl]

Originally Posted by beachwanderer

and the profit from the piece helped fund the Nazi-Party directly.

No, the Nazi-Party didn't get the money. The author's fee went to Hitlers private banking account. At the end he was a rich man, but he didn't pay income tax for many years.

[Andy_T]

I have not read it - but I have listened to it.

I don't know how (considering it has obviously been banned so far), but some years ago i downloaded from Amazon Germany Helmut Qualtinger's rendition of Hitler's "Mein Kampf", simply as it interested me how that book could fascinate so many people.

I have to explain here - Helmut Qualtinger, a late Austrian comic, actor and writer, produced this in 1973, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Nazis ascent to power and to try to explain how it could happen.

He sat down on stage reading simply the words from the book - not the complete book, but excerpts from every chapter, and he used his very distinctive voice and modulation to illustrate the madness behind the words.

Qualtinger was also renowned for creating a figure that has become one of the Austrian archetypes, called "Herr Karl" ("Mister Karl"). This is basically a one-hour-long one-person-monologue depicting the employee of a small delicatessen shop who is arranging the storeroom and explaining to the audience, a "young person", about his past.

What was a major scandal at the time it was first given in my home country Austria was that Mr Karl seems to be a nice, friendly, jovial, slightly naive person, but during the course of the monoloque shows himself as spineless and opportunistic egoist who always tries to profit from whoever is in power. This was a scandal mainly as it was in line with the bahaviour of many Austrian citizens, but normally not mentioned afterwards, Austria having been "the first victim of Nazi oppression"

To anybody who is capable of understanding German, I suggest to listen to those two performances. I guess they are available on youtube.

Best regards,
Andy