Anguish As Reprints Of 'Mein Kampf' Planned For New Year

[Purveyor]

Berlin (AFP) - The copyright of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" expires Friday, with plans by several publishers for annotated reprints sparking fierce debate over how one of the world's most controversial books should be treated seven decades after the defeat of the Nazis.

The southern German state of Bavaria was handed the copyright of the book in 1945, when the Allies gave it the control of the main Nazi publishing house.

For 70 years, it refused to allow the anti-Semitic manifesto to be republished out of respect for victims of the Nazis and to prevent incitement of hatred.

But "Mein Kampf" -- which means "My Struggle" -- falls into the public domain on January 1, meaning that the state of Bavaria can no longer challenge reproductions or translations of the inflammatory work.

For several European countries that were under Nazi occupation, including Austria and the Netherlands, the expiration of copyright will have little impact as reprints and sales of Hitler's diatribe remain banned there.

MORE...

http://news.yahoo.com/anguish-reprints-mein-kampf-planned-105355469.html

[leveymg]

1. You can't banish history. Better to read and understand it than to pretend it never existed.

Censorship protects nobody but those who want to keep a monopoly on "the truth."

[joeybee12]

3. +1

[RKP5637]

4. K&R! n/t

[Wellstone ruled]

9. You are so right.

Censorship is a Neo-Con preferred item. Read my Grand Mothers copy in the late forties(German),found it so hateful and hate mongering and full of rambling ideals.

[Igel]

10. Uh, yeah.

It was under neo-cons that the phrase "Manuscripts don't burn", "Rukopisi ne goryat," was coined.

That samizdat flourished.

It's because of neo-cons that Chinese Internet posters resort to homophonous ideograms to avoid censors.

Even now, only neo-cons are in favor of limiting free speech in order to create safe space and reduce hate-speech on campus.


Now, there's a bit of truth to having neo-cons against free speech. The only reason there's a bit of truth to it is that extreme right and left are agreed that inappropriate speech must be banned: Stalin = Hitler in this regard because to the extent they were both intolerant bastards they shared common traits.

The first American neo-cons, the reason the early neo-cons were neo-conservatives, is that they weren't conservatives before. The term isn't all that old and was applied at first to some very much left-leaning folk who converted to the right and carried with them a lot of the attitudes they had when they were fringe left. When Goldberg used the title "Liberal fascism" for a book a decade ago the title was damned as incoherent; he was using a phrase that Orwell coined in a lecture from the late '30s, pointing out that many British socialists that dubbed themselves liberal were emulating fascist characteristics to an extent that made Orwell more than merely nervous. In some ways he couldn't see a difference between "liberal" socialists and the very non-liberal fascists, hence "liberal fascists".

Paleo-cons in the US were much more moderate than the neo-cons in many, many ways. But neo-cons gained converts and to a large extent won their internal Kulturkampf. Still, you have to get to a relatively extreme neo-con to match a lot of what's said on college campuses by what I suspect Orwell would still call "liberal fascists."

[Wellstone ruled]

14. Point well taken.

As we age we forget what we did learn at on time in History. Thank you for the refresher,excuse the Grey Matter loss. The smartest people in the world are here on DU.

[Luminous Animal]

21. Not so fast. Igel's history lesson is riddled

with inaccuracies.

[jwirr]

15. I have never read it but it sounds a lot like politics today.

[Wellstone ruled]

17. Yes,Propagandist rule the day,and

those who do not question are soon lost.

[awoke_in_2003]

13. I agree...

you cannot ban ideas, but you can expose them, ridicule them, and learn from them.

[malthaussen]

2. What perfect timing.

Herr Trump probably already has plans to print a few million copies.

-- Mal

[SheilaT]

5. I once tried reading it and gave up

after a chapter or so. Totally unreadable in my opinion.

[Purveyor]

7. I took a couple of stabs at the copy I bought from Waldenbooks

years ago.

I too never could get through it.

[Journeyman]

6. I suspect fewer people will read it today than the limited number who read it in its heyday. . .

It's an incredibly boring, obtuse work, quite out of date, and there are plenty of better written, more contemporary works of hate that will continue to appeal to a much greater larger audience. Oh, it'll undoubtedly be bought in great numbers, but if the publisher never finished the face trim and left the folios intact few buyers would notice before they put it on their shelves.

There are far more pertinent fears prevalent today than the resurgence of a musty tome.

[Purveyor]

8. There were many, many more than just a "limited number" who

read the book according to wiki:

Although Hitler originally wrote this book mostly for the followers of National Socialism, it grew in popularity. He accumulated a tax debt of 405,500 Reichsmark (very roughly in 2015 €1.4 million or US$ 1.5 million) from the sale of about 240,000 copies by the time he became chancellor in 1933 (at which time his debt was waived).[17][18]

After Hitler rose to power, the book gained a large amount of popularity. (Two other books written by party members, Gottfried Feder's Breaking The Interest Slavery and Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century, have since lapsed into comparative literary obscurity, and no translation of Feder's book from the original German is known.) The book was in high demand in libraries and often reviewed and quoted in other publications. Hitler had made about 1.2 million Reichsmarks from the income of his book in 1933, when the average annual income of a teacher was about 4,800 Mark.[17][18] During Hitler's years in power, the book was given free to every newlywed couple and every soldier fighting at the front.[18] By 1939 the book had sold 5.2 million copies in 11 languages.[19] By the end of the war, about 10 million copies of the book had been sold or distributed in Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf#Popularity

[Igel]

11. Distinguish between 'bought' or 'borrowed' and 'read cover to cover.'

Such books are like Bibles. Every has one, everybody's read the beginning, but few make it to the end.

Even Putin's little red book probably will suffer the same fate.

Contra the Reuters' article, it's not just one liners. It's also the full text of something like 20 speeches (oh, that those speeches had been one liners--his speeches sometimes go on for far, far too long).

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-putin-idUSKBN0UB1AL20151228

[jwirr]

12. IMO this is the worst time for this to happen. It just makes

me sick.

[bullwinkle428]

16. Should sell like hot cakes at Trump rallies!

[nadinbrzezinski]

20. Becuase it has never before been sold in teh US

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=mein+kampf

Hell, it is available online...

Unlike Bavaria, we have that pesky first amendment.

[uriel1972]

18. It will be more owned than read I assume...

somewhat like the Bible.

[Rex]

19. Treat it has history that should never be forgotten.

[Nye Bevan]

22. Baffling that some consider that the deranged rantings of a madman are so dangerous

that any bookseller who stocks them should be criminally prosecuted. Publish them freely and show everyone how deluded and insane Hitler really was.

[nomorenomore08]

23. I agree, and I also somewhat question Germany's handling of the subject in general.

Vigilance is one thing, paranoia is quite another.

[SwissTony]

24. I just bought a copy (German) from Amazon UK.

I read (most of) the English version many years ago. Turgid reading. I wonder if the German version is any easier. I'll soon find out.

In other confessions, I've also read most of Mao's Little Red Book. And the KJV.