90
years ago on this date, July 18, 1925, Adolf Hitler published his personal
manifesto Mein Kampf. I will
post information about this book from Wikipedia and other links.
REMINDER: Keep in mind, I am
not antisemitic and I have Jewish friends too. I do it for educational
purposes.
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Dust
jacket of the book Mein Kampf, written by Adolf Hitler. Courtesy of the
New York Public Library Digital Collection. (1926 to 1927)
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Author
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Adolf Hitler
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Country
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Germany
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Language
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German
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Genre
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Autobiography, Political theory
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Publisher
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Publication date
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18 July 1925
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Published in
English
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13 October 1933 (abridged)
1939 (full) |
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Media type
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Hardback
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Pages
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720
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ISBN
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Followed by
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Zweites Buch (unpublished)
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Mein Kampf
(pronounced [maɪ̯n
kampf], "My Struggle") is an autobiographical manifesto by National
Socialist leader Adolf Hitler, in which he outlines his political ideology and future plans for
Germany. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2
in 1926. The book was edited by Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess.
Hitler
began dictating the book to Hess while imprisoned for what he considered to be
"political crimes" following his failed Putsch in Munich in November
1923. Although Hitler received many visitors initially, he soon devoted himself
entirely to the book. As he continued, Hitler realized that it would have to be
a two-volume work, with the first volume scheduled for release in early 1925.
The governor of Landsberg noted at the time that "he [Hitler] hopes the
book will run into many editions, thus enabling him to fulfill his financial
obligations and to defray the expenses incurred at the time of his trial."
Title
Hitler
originally wanted to call his forthcoming book Viereinhalb Jahre (des
Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit, or Four and a Half Years (of
Struggle) Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. Max Amann,
head of the Franz Eher Verlag and Hitler's publisher, is said to have suggested
the much shorter "Mein Kampf" or "My Struggle".
Contents
The
arrangement of chapters is as follows:
- Volume One: A Reckoning
- Chapter 1: In the House of my Parents
- Chapter 2: Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna
- Chapter 3: General Political Considerations Based on my Vienna Period
- Chapter 4: Munich
- Chapter 5: The World War
- Chapter 6: War Propaganda
- Chapter 7: The Revolution
- Chapter 8: The Beginning of my Political Activity
- Chapter 9: The "German Workers' Party"
- Chapter 10: Causes of the Collapse
- Chapter 11: Nation and Race
- Chapter 12: The First Period of Development of the National Socialist German Workers' Party
- Volume Two: The National Socialist Movement
- Chapter 1: Philosophy and Party
- Chapter 2: The State
- Chapter 3: Subjects and Citizens
- Chapter 4: Personality and the Conception of the Völkisch State
- Chapter 5: Philosophy and Organization
- Chapter 6: The Struggle of the Early Period – the Significance of the Spoken Word
- Chapter 7: The Struggle with the Red Front
- Chapter 8: The Strong Man Is Mightiest Alone
- Chapter 9: Basic Ideas Regarding the Meaning and Organization of the Sturmabteilung
- Chapter 10: Federalism as a Mask
- Chapter 11: Propaganda and Organization
- Chapter 12: The Trade-Union Question
- Chapter 13: German Alliance Policy After the War
- Chapter 14: Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy
- Chapter 15: The Right of Emergency Defense
- Conclusion
- Index
Analysis
In
Mein Kampf, Hitler used the main thesis of "the Jewish peril",
which posits a Jewish conspiracy to gain world leadership. The narrative
describes the process by which he became increasingly antisemitic and militaristic, especially during his years
in Vienna. He speaks of not having met a Jew
until he arrived in Vienna, and that at first his attitude was liberal and
tolerant. When he first encountered the anti-semitic press, he says, he
dismissed it as unworthy of serious consideration. Later he accepted the same
anti-semitic views, which became crucial in his program of national
reconstruction of Germany.
Mein Kampf
has also been studied as a work on political theory. For example, Hitler
announces his hatred of what he believed to be the world's two evils: Communism
and Judaism. The new territory that Germany
needed to obtain would properly nurture the "historic destiny" of the
German people; this goal, which Hitler referred to as Lebensraum (living space), explains why
Hitler aggressively expanded Germany eastward, specifically the invasions of
Czechoslovakia and Poland, before he launched his attack against the Soviet
Union. In Mein Kampf Hitler openly states that the future of Germany
"has to lie in the acquisition of land in the East at the expense of
Russia."
During
his work, Hitler blamed Germany's chief woes on the parliament
of the Weimar Republic,
the Jews, and Social
Democrats, as well as Marxists, though he
believed that Marxists, Social Democrats, and the parliament were all working
for Jewish interests. He announced that he wanted to completely destroy the parliamentary
system, believing it to be corrupt in principle, as those who reach
power are inherent opportunists.
Antisemitism
While
historians diverge on the exact date Hitler decided to forcibly
emigrate the Jewish people to Madagascar, few place the decision before the
mid 1930s. First published in 1925, Mein Kampf shows the ideas that
crafted Hitler's personal grievances and ambitions for creating a New Order.
The
racial laws to which Hitler referred resonate directly with his ideas in Mein
Kampf. In his first edition of Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that the
destruction of the weak and sick is far more humane than their protection.
Apart from his allusion to humane treatment, Hitler saw a purpose in destroying
"the weak" in order to provide the proper space and purity for the
"strong".
Popularity
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).
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. During Hitler's
years in power, the book was given free to every newlywed couple and every
soldier fighting at the front. By 1939 the book had sold 5.2 million copies in
11 languages. By the end of the war, about 10 million copies of the book
had been sold or distributed in Germany.
After
becoming chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler began to distance himself from
the book and dismissed it as "fantasies behind bars" that were little
more than a series of articles for the Völkischer Beobachter and later told Hans Frank
that "If I had had any idea in 1924 that I would
have become Reich chancellor, I never would have written the book."
There
are currently six e-book versions of Mein Kampf available for sale. In 2014 two
of these version reached the 12th and 15th spots on the iTunes Politics and
Current Events section. The same year a digital version of the book reached
number one on the Amazon Propaganda and Political Psychology chart.
Contemporary
observations
Mein Kampf,
in essence, lays out the ideological program Hitler established for the German
revolution, by identifying the Jews and "Bolsheviks," as racially and
ideologically inferior and threatening, and "Aryans" and National
Socialists as racially superior and politically progressive. Hitler's
revolutionary goals included expulsion of the Jews from Greater Germany and the
unification of German peoples into one Greater Germany. Hitler desired to
restore German lands to their greatest historical extent, real or imagined.
Due
to its racist content and the historical effect of
Nazism upon Europe during World War II and
the Holocaust, it is considered a highly
controversial book. Criticism has not come solely from opponents of Nazism. Italian Fascist dictator and Nazi ally Benito Mussolini was also critical of the
book, saying that it was "a boring tome that I have never been able to
read" and remarked that Hitler's beliefs, as expressed in the book, were
"little more than commonplace clichés".
One
direct opponent of National Socialism, Konrad Heiden, observed that the content of
Mein Kampf is essentially a political argument with other members of the
Nazi Party who had appeared to be Hitler's friends, but whom he was actually
denouncing in the book's content – sometimes by not even including
references to them.
In
The
Second World War, Winston Churchill wrote that he felt that
after Hitler's ascension to power, no other book deserved more intensive
scrutiny.
The
American literary theorist and philosopher Kenneth Burke wrote a rhetorical analysis
of the work, The
Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle", which revealed its
underlying message of aggressive intent.
German
publication history
While
Hitler was in power (1933–1945), Mein Kampf came to be available in
three common editions. The first, the Volksausgabe or People's Edition,
featured the original cover on the dust jacket and was navy blue underneath
with a gold swastika eagle embossed on the cover. The Hochzeitsausgabe,
or Wedding Edition, in a slipcase with the seal of the province embossed in
gold onto a parchment-like cover was given free to marrying couples. In 1940,
the Tornister-Ausgabe was released. This edition was a compact, but
unabridged, version in a red cover and was released by the post office,
available to be sent to loved ones fighting at the front. These three editions
combined both volumes into the same book.
A
special edition was published in 1939 in honour of Hitler's 50th birthday. This
edition was known as the Jubiläumsausgabe, or Anniversary Issue. It came
in both dark blue and bright red boards with a gold sword on the cover. This
work contained both volumes one and two.
It
was considered a deluxe version, relative to the smaller and more common Volksausgabe.
The
book could also be purchased as a two-volume set during Hitler's reign, and was
available in soft cover and hardcover. The soft cover edition contained the
original cover (as pictured at the top of this article). The hardcover edition
had a leather spine with cloth-covered boards. The cover and spine contained an
image of three brown oak leaves.
English
translations
Dugdale abridgement
Reynal and Hitchcock translation
Murphy translation
Stackpole translation and controversy
Cranston translation and controversy
7.6
Manheim translation
7.6.1
Excerpts
7.6.2
Official Nazi translation
Sales and royalties
Current availability
Canada
India
Russia
Sweden
Turkey
United States
Online availability
Republication in Germany after 2015
Sequel
After
the party's poor showing in the 1928 elections, Hitler believed that the reason
for his loss was the public's misunderstanding of his ideas. He then retired to
Munich to dictate a sequel to Mein Kampf to expand on its ideas, with
more focus on foreign policy.
Only
two copies of the 200-page manuscript were originally made, and only one of
these was ever made public. The document was neither edited nor published
during the Nazi era and remains known as Zweites Buch, or
"Second Book". To keep the document strictly secret, in 1935 Hitler
ordered that it be placed in a safe in an air raid shelter. It remained there
until being discovered by an American officer in 1945.
The
authenticity of the document found in 1945 has been verified by Josef Berg
(former employee of the Nazi publishing house Eher Verlag) and Telford Taylor
(former Brigadier General U.S.A.R. and Chief Counsel at the Nuremberg
war-crimes trials).
In
1958, the Zweites Buch was found in the archives of the United States by
American historian Gerhard Weinberg. Unable to find an American publisher,
Weinberg turned to his mentor – Hans Rothfels at the Institute of
Contemporary History in Munich, and his associate Martin Broszat – who
published Zweites Buch in 1961. A pirated edition was published in
English in New York in 1962. The first authoritative English edition was not
published until 2003 (Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf,
ISBN
1-929631-16-2).
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