[Newsbot]

Title: Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf at centre of fresh controversy
Category: World
Posted By: Hyack
Date: 2014-06-06 13:53:45

[BRAH]

Keep it, study it so the World never forgets as it's a piece of history.

[stratos]

Interesting, I did not know that Bavaria held the copy rights to it. I read it in the early 80's found it kind of boring.

[DanSC]

To remove Mein Kampf from history is to pretend it never happened; an utterly horrible thought.

[Thanos]

I'd wager that Germans at the time were far more impressed with Hitler's speeches which were lucid and greatly dynamic. Mein Kampf was a particular bit of idiocy, difficult to read and clearly written by an amateur who was far better at conveying his ideas through the spoken word than the written one.

German laws today are a real minefield to walk through when it comes to anything to do with the Nazi past. I build plastic model kits, for example. Due to German law, the kit manufacturers in the US/Japan/China won't show a swastika on the tailfin of a German plane on the box art because it's illegal to display on anything imported into Germany and they wouldn't be allowed to sell the kit there. The manufacturers in Germany itself won't even include a swastika on the decal sheet for any WW2 German plane kits they produce, not even the kits they export elsewhere, because it's basically illegal to even print a Nazi Party symbol. It's a weird sort of censorship because the Germans are convinced that any display of Nazi symbols will serve as some kind of rallying point for neo-Nazi behaviour. I don't believe it myself but apparently the Germans do and that's why their current laws on this issue are so stringent. The controversy of Tom Cruise playing Klaus Von Stauffenberg in the Valkyrie movie from a few years back is another example; it shows how strong the Germans feel about this as they regard the Scientology nonsense that Cruise adheres to as being too similar in structure and top-down autocratic organization, as well as the totalitarian cult-like behaviour of Scientology members, to how the Nazi Party was organized and how it operated on a social level.

The Germans have the right to ban Mein Kampf if they want to. It belongs to the state and there are no heirs, just academics and historians, to oppose the decision. It's a burial of legitimate history though. In it's own way, in the way it wants to obliterate something from existence altogether, it's as totalitarian as what the Nazis did with their own bogus re-writings of history. Personally I think that the entire concept in Mein Kampf is so odious and ridiculous, not to mention that it was convincingly burnt out of the German psyche pretty much altogether during the war by the death and devastation the Allies and Soviets inflicted on Germany, that there is no legitimate danger of Nazism ever reviving in Germany again.

[BRAH]

He had good taste in Music.

[BartSimpson]

Thanos Thanos:

I'd wager that Germans at the time were far more impressed with Hitler's speeches which were lucid and greatly dynamic. Mein Kampf was a particular bit of idiocy, difficult to read and clearly written by an amateur who was far better at conveying his ideas through the spoken word than the written one.

I've read it and have discussed it with my father-in-law who was raised in the Hitler Youth and who served in the Werhmacht in 1944-1945 as a teenager.

He explained many of the metaphors and also explained to me that the English translation didn't carry even a fraction of the emotional impact of the original hoch Deutsch (academic language) text. He had a copy of it and I have it on my bookshelf now.

For a German-language audience the book had an impact along the lines of how the Arab Muslims get lathered up by the writings of Ibn Taymiyyah. Hitler (and his ghostwriters) crafted the thing as a piece of inflammatory propaganda that was designed to leave the reader in an emotional state that straddled the border of rage and ecstasy.

For a minority in Germany the book was very effective. For most it was dreck.

Sadly, the minority took power with the votes of that same majority who saw the Nazis as their last hope.

In any case, the book is dangerous with a German language audience and I agree it should be suppressed. Just watching my father-in-law transform as he would speak about it was a very sobering experience...and this was a man who was thoroughly disillusioned with the Nazis. I pause to consider the impact on someone who'd be willing to look at them less cynically.

[Goober911]

When you start banning books, what next is banned. I do understand the position behind this, I also disagree with it. Time enough has passed.
To hide from history is to deny and forget.