A new translation of Mein Kampf was released on Wednesday by the French publisher Fayard after the publication was delayed for years due to the controversy over publishing a book written by an antisemite like Adolf Hitler.
Hitler's Mein Kampf ("My Struggle" in German) first appeared in two volumes in 1925 and 1927 when he was in prison after he led the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923.
The text is a manifesto of his Nazi ideology, which led to the murder of some six million Jews and 17 million people altogether in the Holocaust. Mein Kampf is a sort of autobiography, as Hitler recounts his childhood in Austria and his experience as a German soldier in the First World War.
The book was banned in Germany by the Allies in 1945.
However, historians behind this new project said that the polemical release of this edited version of the book will perform a valuable service in elucidating and thereby disarming the Nazi ideology for French readers.
Indeed, the new version of Hitler's Mein Kampf is an extended adaptation of the previous edition, with contributions from over a dozen experts and historians led by Florent Brayard, a French historian specializing in Nazism and the Holocaust, and Andreas Wirsching, the director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, which had led work on the German version.
The book titled Historicizing Evil: A Critical Edition of Mein Kampf is at approximately 1,000 pages, with twice as much commentary as text. Scholars, researchers, and teachers are the main target audience.
Each of the 27 chapters is prefaced by an introductory analysis, and Hitler’s writing is annotated, line by line, with commentary that debunks false statements and provides historical context, the New York Times explained. Fayard, which first started work on the project a decade ago, said the book was a “fundamental source to understand the history of the 20th century.”
With Mein Kampf now in the public domain and freely available online with little to no context, Fayard argued that it was urgent to publish a critical version that would deconstruct the text and guard against uncritical translations that still circulate.
“To know where we are going, it is vital that we understand where we are coming from,” Sophie de Closets, the head of Fayard, wrote in a letter to booksellers explaining the reasoning behind the publication, the New York Times reported.