Tuesday, July 14, 2015

“Mein Kampf”

The book "Archangel" has an observation that is inherent to its story line: The real villain in the last Century was Stalin, not Hitler. Hitler was a single individual at a single historical moment, Stalin was a refined evil in a long history of evil. Hitler was an event, Stalin a process. One point was that "Mein Kampf" was on humanity's Index where Stalin's political party regularly publishes its literature and gets 20 to 30 percent of the vote.
Old copies of the “Mein Kampf” are kept in a secure cabinet, called the “poison cabinet,” in the dark recesses of the vast Bavarian State Library. A team of experts vets every request to see one. “This book is too dangerous for the general public,” library historian Florian Sepp warns. 
Nevertheless, the book that once served as a kind of Nazi bible, banned from domestic reprints since the end of World War II, will soon be returning to German bookstores.
The prohibition on reissuing the book has been upheld by the state of Bavaria, which owns the German copyright. But those rights expire in December, and the first new print run since Hitler’s death is due out early next year. The new edition is a heavily annotated volume in its original German that is stirring an impassioned debate over history, anti-Semitism and the latent power of the written word.

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