A new critical edition of Mein Kampf is set to make its debut on German bestseller lists this weekend, after Adolf Hitler’s political manifesto went on sale in the country last week for the first time since the second world war.
The German book trade paper Buchreport, which puts together the charts for the news magazine Der Spiegel, has said that the 2,000-page annotated version of the Nazi text, which costs €59, will be in 20th position on the non-fiction bestseller chart in Der Spiegel on Saturday.
Earlier this week, the work’s publisher, the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, said that it had increased the print run for the title due to demand, upping its initial batch of 4,000 after receiving 15,000 orders.
The Nazi political manifesto, first published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, is the only complete book by Hitler. Deemed “turgid, repetitious, wandering, illogical, and, in the first edition at least, filled with grammatical errors”, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, it was a bestseller in Germany in the 1930s, selling more than 12m copies, but after the second world war, the Bavarian ministry to which copyright had been passed by the Allies refrained from publishing it. On 1 January 2016 the copyright ran out, and the Munich Institute released a new critical edition which runs to more than 2,000 pages, with 3,700 annotations – twice as long as the original edition – on 8 January.
“The edition unmasks Hitler’s false allegations, his whitewashing and outright lies,” the Institute’s head, Andreas Wirsching, said on Friday. Historian Christian Hartmann, who worked on the text, said earlier this month that the intention in publishing the book was to “to show how Hitler mixed truths and half-truths with lies – to take the sting out of the propaganda at the same time as laying Nazism bare”.
Der Spiegel’s Martin Doerry and Klaus Wiegrefe described reading the critical edition as “sometimes tedious but fruitful”, adding that “anyone who has read [it] is likely to have been permanently immunised against the ideological poison of the book”. In an editorial on 12 January, the Guardian praised the “care, wisdom and admirable scholarship” with which the new edition has been put together, saying that the publication “goes one step further towards demystifying the roots of the evil that unfolded. Exposure, not hiding, is the best way to neutralise the conspiratorial thinking and sinister fascination that can be aroused by a forbidden object.”
Buchreport speculated that the title’s position in Der Spiegel’s charts would further stimulate discussion in the German book trade. According to the Bookseller’s German correspondent (paywall), few shops have placed Mein Kampf at the front of their stores, with the “vast majority” of booksellers choosing not to stock the title, but to order it only when customers request it.
Earlier this month, a Berlin bookseller told the Guardian that it would order the book for customers, but would not stock it. “We’ve had the first inquiries,” they said. “One person was at pains to stress that he was a teacher, but he asked about it as if he was asking us to produce explicit porn from behind the counter.”
Wirsching asked bookshops to be patient over delays in delivery of the critical edition. “Some shops at first waited to stock the book, which is understandable with such a sensitive project,” he said. “But on our side everything is underway to keep the book available.”
