Why ‘Mein Kampf’ Is a Must-Read Now
Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto was re-released in a new, highly annotated academic edition, in German. With 3,500 footnotes and nearly 2,000 pages in two volumes, the new book is more than twice as long as Hitler’s 782-page original.
.. It’s time for the long-taboo book to face the harsh light of common scrutiny by a German public that is three generations removed from the war. And it is high time, even long overdue, that German schoolchildren and university students have the benefit of direct access to the early raw material of Hitler’s madness, just as they have long been able to read his speeches and see him perform in old film clips... Hitler’s original, aggressively marketed by his Munich publisher, sold more than 12 million copies.. With the footnotes snaking throughout the text, the new Mein Kampf more closely resembles a theological treatise than a political tract. “Ironically, [the newly annotated Mein Kampf] will look like the Talmud,” noted Dan Michman, head of international research at Yad Vashem museum in Israel... The Talmudic analogy flows from the decision by the Mein Kampf academic team to “encircle” Hitler’s words with the analytical and deconstructing footnotes. “We wanted to surround the text to demystify it and destroy it,” says Hartmann. Since 2009, his team of five scholars—with help from several dozen others—has traced and dissected the origins of Hitler’s complex, sometimes outrageous thinking almost sentence-by-sentence... The conference of state justice ministers, who enforce laws like incitement to hatred, have said they will prosecute anyone who publishes a non-annotated version of Mein Kampf.