In Germany, attitudes toward ‘Mein Kampf’ slowly changing



By Michael Birnbaum, Published: January 27








Berlin — The city that was the center of Adolf Hitler’s empire is
littered with reminders of the Nazi past, from the bullet holes that
pit the fronts of many buildings to the hulking Luftwaffe headquarters
that now house the Finance Ministry.
What it doesn’t have, nor has it since 1945, are copies of
Hitler’s autobiography and political manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” in its
bookstores. The latest attempt to publish excerpts fizzled this week
after the Bavarian government challenged it in court, although an
expurgated copy appeared at newspaper kiosks around the country.









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But in Germany — where keeping a tight lid on Hitler’s writings
has become a rich tradition in itself — attitudes toward his book are
slowly changing, and fewer people are objecting to its becoming more
widely available.No law bans “Mein Kampf” in Germany, but the
government of Bavaria, where Hitler officially resided at the time of
his 1945 suicide, holds the copyright and guards it ferociously.
German-language copies that were printed before 1945 are legal, although
they command a premium price, and the book is available in translation
elsewhere in the world. But the question of whether to publish it
in the country where Hitler plotted his empire has lost some of its
edge in the Google era, when a complete German-language copy of the book
pops up as the second result on the local version of the search engine.“To
say this is a very dangerous book, we must ban it, this is ridiculous,”
said Wolfgang Wippermann, a professor of modern history at the Free
University of Berlin. “Maybe it was necessary once, but now it’s over,
it makes no sense. You can find it so easily.”The publisher of
the excerpts, London-based Albertus, has said it will appeal the
Bavarian government’s injunction. In 2009, the publisher beat charges of
copyright violation and the illegal use of Nazi symbols after the
Bavarian government seized reprinted copies of the Nazi Party’s in-house
newspaper.The attempt to publish portions of “Mein Kampf” on
Thursday was scuttled at the last moment, although the publisher, ready
to capitalize on the publicity, had printed two versions of the
pamphlet. The version propped on top of a heap of celebrity magazines at
a newsstand in Berlin’s central Friedrichstrasse station was a slender,
blue, 16-page leaflet that has historical commentary in one column and
an image of blurred text stamped with “Unreadable” in the other,
accompanied by two reproductions of Nazi-era newspapers.“Mein
Kampf” “is an awful book, and the whole thinking is absolutely not ours,
but we have another view on it regarding the idea of packing it away.
This idea is just naive,” said Alexander Luckow, a spokesman for the
publisher. “In a free country, you need to discuss these very bad parts
of German history.”Still, he said, there are limits, and using
Hitler’s words as inspiration, not as historical artifact, is where it
crosses the line.“The danger is allowing right-wing people to
sell it in bookshops with their modern commentary,” he said. “This is
forbidden and it’s good . . . not only in Germany, this should be equal
in other countries in Europe. Anti-Semitism is not confined to Germany.
You look and it’s all around Europe, dating back to the Middle Ages.”The
debate will soon be over, whether or not the latest excerpts make it to
newsstands. German law extends copyright 70 years after the author’s
death; after 2015, “Mein Kampf” will be fair game. Some in Bavaria’s
government worry that neo-Nazis will publish their own version of the
book shortly thereafter, and to counter that, they are encouraging a scholarly edition. A group of historians is preparing it.Germany’s
Jewish organizations have approached the publication with mixed
emotions, sensitive that their country still has problems with neo-Nazis
and anti-Semitism. The German government released a study this week
that found that one in five Germans has anti-Semitic attitudes. And a
neo-Nazi ring that has been linked to at least nine killings before it
was shut down in November shocked Germans who thought they had done a
thorough job working through their past.“I do very well without any publishing of ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” said Dieter Graumann, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
“In a few years, it will be free, and I have every trust in the
democratic maturity of the German people. . . . But for the moment, I am
glad it is not.”