Otto Strasser, an early follower of Adolf Hitler who later broke with him and escaped from Germany, recalled a dinner with top Nazi officials at the 1927 Party Congress in Nuremberg. When it became apparent that no one had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf in its entirety, they agreed to ask anyone who joined them if he had done so—and stick whoever answered in the affirmative with the bill. As Strasser reported in his memoirs, “Nobody had read Mein Kampf, so everyone had to pay his own bill.”
There’s a reason that even many of Hitler’s followers never bothered to plow through the two volumes of his autobiographical screed: it makes for an excruciating reading experience, no matter what your political leanings. Which is just one reason why the successful bid by the Bavarian authorities this week to uphold the postwar ban on publishing the book in Germany defies logic. A far more sensible approach would be for the authorities to lift the ban long before Bavaria’s copyright expires in 2015.
When Hitler was on the rise, the most perceptive American correspondents in Germany despaired that almost no outsiders had paid any attention to Mein Kampf. H.R. Knickerbocker, the Berlin correspondent of the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post, told a fellow American reporter who had just arrived in the German capital to read the book right away. “No American I know of has taken the trouble to read it seriously, but it’s all there: his plan for the conquest for Europe,” he told him.
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