Mein Kampf Is a Chilling

Mein Kampf is a chilling piece of history, Hitler's autobiography. Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while he was imprisoned in Munich. He was sentenced to four years for participating in the Beer Hall Putch in 1923 ("Mein Kampf: Nazi Germany"). The book title translates to "My Struggle." In the autobiography, Hitler claims that the Aryan race is superior to others, that intermarriage taints the Aryan bloodline, and that Jews are "lazy and had contributed little to world civilization." Hitler goes farther to accuse Jews of aligning themselves with the Communist in order to take over the world. In fact, Hitler's anti-Semitic views are articulated in Mein Kampf, where Hitler planted the seeds for the Third Reich and the Holocaust. The ban on Mein Kampf in Germany proves that Germans are sensitive to what the book represents. However, censoring a key piece of history does not ensure that such atrocities will never happen again. Germany should allow Hitler's autobiography to be republished so that the material can be discussed intelligently and openly.

The German government has banned the publication of Mein Kampf since the end of World War Two. The book has been banned for a good reason. "Many are concerned the frenzied tome could become a kind of scripture for right-wing extremists," (Smith). Fear that the book would fuel cult groups devoted to Hitler is genuine. Yet right-wing extremism and neo-Nazism has flourished regardless of the status of the book.

The ban does suppress dialogue about the book, which is generally believed to be poorly written anyway: Mein Kampf is "repetitive, confused, turgid and therefore, extremely difficult to read." (Mein Kampf: Nazi Germany"). Sautter notes that at 800 pages, the book is "long-winded and badly written." Although most Germans owned a copy during the Nazi era, "few Germans managed to get through all of its turgid prose," (Paterson).

Mein Kampf is not, however, banned because it's a bad book. It is banned because it is an anti-Semitic diatribe written by the man who orchestrated the Holocaust. The spread of neo-Nazism in the United States has raised genuine fears that releasing the book could spark interest in white supremacy.

The ban on Mein Kampf has become less effective because of the Internet. The Internet allows German citizens to access copies of Mein Kampf online. More importantly, the legal rights to Mein Kampf are controlled by the state of Bavaria. Those rights expire in 2015, at which point the book becomes public domain and may be republished at will. The German government currently faces a controversial decision: whether or not to republish Mein Kampf.