THE entering into the public domain this month of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle), first published in 1926, is already rife with bitter debate in a number of countries in Europe.
Not that the book was unavailable or even banned during all these 90 years, but it had remained, technically speaking at least, the exclusive property of Bavaria, the eastern federal state of Germany. The current controversy, in Germany as well as in France, has to do with the proposal by a number of education experts to have Hitler’s infamous work entered into the regular syllabi of schools and colleges.
They insist that prefaced with adequate commentaries in order to prepare today’s teenagers for the shock, the study of Mein Kampf could immunise future world leaders against all sorts of political extremism and prepare them to create just societies.
Those who have had the opportunity, and patience, to go through the entire length of Hitler’s two-volume autobiography agree that at least the first quarter of its 750 pages makes immensely interesting reading, after all.
In the early chapters of the book that he started writing in 1924 while undergoing a prison sentence for treason, the future German dictator recounts his miserable childhood in an extremely poor peasant family that lived in a tiny village in the Bavarian part of the Austrian empire.
It was not for nothing that the eternal movie bumpkin Charlie Chaplin was inspired by the Fuhrer in his classic film The Dictator. Following the death of his father, a very young Adolf Hitler moved to Vienna where he stayed for some years — wearing rags, often eating no more than a single meal a day and sleeping on sidewalks.
His only distractions in Vienna were Richard Wagner’s operas and the speeches of politicians. “They mostly talked nonsense, but I was fascinated by the art of public speaking,” he writes in his book.
It was also during this period that he would get familiar with three elements that dominated the rest of his life and played a crucial part in the development of the Nazi ideology: his hatred of the Jews, his fascination with the supposed racial superiority of the Aryan people and his devotion to the goal of creating a unified Germany under the Third Reich.
The rest of the pages are often boring details and repeated insistence on making the Aryans lead the world, without ever clarifying his hypothesis that only Germans are Aryans and not the eastern or northern Europeans who share the same physical traits of skin, hair and eye colour with the Germans.
Justifying the move to have Mein Kampf as part of the regular curricula in schools, German Socialist Party (SPD) leader Ernst Dieter Rossmann said: “Explaining to the young the mechanism of mass propaganda campaigns and disdain for the minorities should be an essential part of our modern education system.”
To which a German government spokesman had replied, probably only for form’s sake, that any attempt to bring out Hitler’s oeuvre in the country, whether complete or in parts, will be punishable.
As far as France is concerned, the publishing house Fayard has announced it has already selected a panel of well-known historians to prepare introductory articles that would help create a “scientific version” of Mein Kampf programmed to be available in its French translation by the end of this year.
Ironically, the most interesting comment on the book comes from nobody else but the author himself. Following his ascent to power in 1933 as master of Germany, he qualified Mein Kampf as “a collection of fantasies from a man behind bars” and said: “If I had any idea in 1924 that I would one day become the chancellor, I would never have written that book!”
—The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, January 10th, 2016
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