It was widely noted during the contretemps over the novelist Gunter Grass's recent effusions about Israel being a threat to world peace that a divide emerged in Germany. On the one side were the intellectual and political elites that condemned his comments. On the other side was the public, which tended to sympathize with Grass and complain about a "cudgel" being wielded to silence debate about the German past.
Now, Germany is taking a new step toward what is often called "normalization." The state of Bavaria has announced that in 2015 it will publish Hitler's Mein Kampf, which first appeared in 1925. A second volume was issued in 1926. The book was written in Landsberg prison, where Hitler was incarcerated after his failed putsch in 1923.
Hitler, you could say, was made in Bavaria. He left Austria and served in the Reichwehr rather than the Austrian army, which he was officially obliged to join. After World War I, Hitler began his rise in Bavaria, where he launched the Beer Hall putsch and where he was fawned over by a number of local aristocrats, including the Bechsteins, who helped finance him and the Nazi Party. Bavaria was a hotbed of right-wing movements in the postwar era, which Hitler welded into the Nazi party. His talent, which no one had accomplished in Germany, was to unify the various splinter groups into a mighty organization. Munich itself was known as the "Haupstadt der Bewegung"—capital of the movement. So Bavaria has much to contemplate and rue when it looks back at the past.
Is its decision to publish Hitler's autobiography a sign that Germany is backsliding? Not at all. Mein Kampf has been banned in Germany since World War II, and the Bavarian justice system recently prevented the English publisher Peter McGee from publishing excerpts from it in Munich. But the ban, it must be said, no longer makes much sense. The book can be easily acquired abroad or on the Internet. In announcing the publication of the book, Bavarian finance minister Markus Soeder says that he wants to contribute to the "demystification" of it. In 2015, the Bavarian state's copyright to the book will expire. The idea is to publish a scholarly version that will help stem its appeal for commercial publishers.
Hitler himself would surely be displeased to know that his book was, in effect, being further defanged by a democratic Germany, which is treating it in a calm and clinical manner. The truth is that the book itself is an unedfying farrago of the various anti-Semitic books that Hitler, a tireless autodidact, had read over the years, a topic that Timothy Ryback covers in his book Hitler's Private Library. The title itself crystallized Hitler's worldview of a social Darwinist struggle for power and survival, a message that resonated in a postwar Germany humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles and bludgeoned by economic crisis. In the 1920s and 1930s, the book was a smash sensation and made Hitler rich. Whether it will arouse much interest or even sell many copies today, though, may be wondered.
More important for the future of Germany and Europe is how a new German chancellor, Angela Merkel, will respond to the economic crisis that once more assails the continent. As Germany sticks to its calls for fiscal austerity, right-wing political parties in Greece and France are on the move. It would be ironic if Germany, in its quest to avoid the inflation of the Weimar years, ended up creating the circumstances for the resurgence of the political Right in other European countries by adhering too rigidly to restrictive monetary policies.
Comments
Dear Mr, Heilbrun, I have no quarrel with your brief account of the history of MEIN KAMPF. However, "contretemp" no longer describes the continuing firestorm that the Grass poem/ op-ed of Aril 3rd has created. How often has it happened that a prime minister has repeatedly inveighed agianst it, as has Netanjahu? You also misrepresent the the way the cookie has crumbled for and against or ambivalently about the poem. The German government, staunchly pro-Israel, has come out critically - his own party, the SPD, now supports him to the hilt! So do considerable figures in the public sphere such as Jakob Augstein. In the US what I can only call the entirely pro-Israel no matter what Neo-Cons who also support a first strike against Iran have of course come out against Grass. The anti-Zionists seem to support him! However, the attempt to smear the poem as anti-semitic and rub Grasss nose in his having been as a 17 year old for three months in the SS shows the nerve he has touched! The nerve of truth - otherwise why they huge upset? The poem is not anti-semitic, Grass bends over backward to get past that obvious hurdle. First of all, Grass is ethnically a Kashubian, a very minority Slavic tribe in former East Prussia, if anyone had actually read THE TIN DRUM he would know [1] that in that region all the Slavs had German names and all the Kowalskis were German, and that with respect to Nationalism this lent a special twist and [2] that Grass was possibly pro-Jewish in the loving way he describes the Jewish toy salesman / store owner in Dansk. His father was a fervent Nazi and wanted his son to join the SS, who wanted to enroll in the Navy [Marine] as you might guess if he read CAT AND MOUSE. He was a kid! He was in the SS for three months and was caputured by the Americans in May 1945, he had discarded his ss uniform by then, he was obviously embarrassed by his memembership and so did not mention it to a larger public until 2007 in his memoir PEELNG THiE ONION. Now everyone rubs his nose in it. How cheap and nasty can you get! These dreadful people like Josef Joffe [see the Wall Street Journal for this] who could be a righthand man to a Goebbels have nothing better to do to divert from Grass's truth that Israel/ the US has been planning, and nearly already did execute a pre-emptive strike on Iran. For this undertaking they have the backing of the Neo-Cons, of AIPAC, it is indeed a dangerous situtation, and there is no telling how that war would spread. Whether Grass or whoever is anti-semitic or was a Nazi as a kid, is entirely irrelevant,if they could not level those charges they would find other diversions, it is also entirerly irrelevant whether Netanyahoo or Avigdor Liebermann are Jewish. First of all, they are both demagogues and are both gangsters, goons. They instrumentalize the Holocaust and use it as blackmail. http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2012/04/gunter-grass-what-must-be-said.html contains daily updated links to the 100 + different positive and negative positions taken on the Grass anti-war poem controversy. I myself am doing a summary that may be done by the end of the month. However, it looks as though this might get to be a bigger story than just Grass and his poem.http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name