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\n Photo by Hulton Archive\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n Photo by Hulton Archive\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Just over 100 years ago, on 18 July 1925, the most notorious book of the 20th century was published \u2013 Mein Kampf (\u201cMy Struggle\u201d) by Adolf Hitler, who became dictator of Germany less than eight years later. It has been described as the epitome of \u201cabsolute evil\u201d, the \u201cmost disgusting of all books\u201d and \u201cthe nadir of depravity\u201d. More than a few historians have regarded the book as providing a blueprint for what came later, from the destruction of German democracy and the genocide of Europe\u2019s Jews to the launching of the Second World War and the ruthless ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe by the Nazis. Its centenary provides an opportunity for re-examining its origins, its nature and its influence.<\/p>\n
Hitler began writing the book during a period of enforced idleness following his arrest and imprisonment for leading a violent attempt to overthrow the state government of Bavaria on 9 November 1923 \u2013 the so-called Beer Hall Putsch \u2013 which ended in a hail of bullets fired at him and his Nazi supporters by the Bavarian police. Brought to trial in Munich on 26 February 1924, Hitler claimed that he had acted purely out of patriotic motives. He regarded the democratic political order of the Weimar Republic, founded in the wake of Germany\u2019s defeat in the First World War and the overthrow of the Kaiser, as an expression of anti-German sentiments. It was dominated by liberals and socialists who had put their names to what he saw as Germany\u2019s betrayal in the Treaty of Versailles. He found a willing listener in the judge, Georg Neithardt, who allowed him to speak at length from the dock, and meted out to him the remarkably lenient sentence of five years in \u201cfortress confinement\u201d, a form of punishment reserved for offenders who had acted from \u201chonourable\u201d motives, such as duellists.<\/p>\n
Immediately after the failure of the putsch, Hitler had been plunged into a deep depression and gave serious thought to suicide. He even began a hunger strike in protest against his arrest and incarceration. But he pulled himself together with the help of his close political associates and wrote a lengthy defence of his actions for use in court. This formed the kernel of the far longer piece of writing that eventually became Mein Kampf. He was able to compose it because, under the astonishingly indulgent conditions of his sentence, he was allowed visitors \u2013 325 of them altogether during his months of confinement. Some of them, notably Winifred Wagner, the English-born daughter-in-law of the composer Richard Wagner, brought him reams of paper and writing materials, while his patron and tutor Helene Bechstein provided a typewriter. Meanwhile, his visitors supplied him with so much food that his cell was known in the prison as \u201cthe delicatessen\u201d.<\/p>\n
Hitler was a relatively uneducated man, and it used to be thought that he had dictated much of the text to his fellow inmate and slavish admirer Rudolf Hess, who had studied history and economics at the University of Munich. But in fact we now know that the writing was all Hitler\u2019s own work. His style was crude and unpolished, and the book is rambling, poorly structured and often difficult to follow. Its original title, which his publisher got him to drop in favour of the snappier Mein Kampf , was Four and a Half Years [of Struggle] Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. Had he not followed his publisher\u2019s advice, the book might have sold fewer copies.<\/p>\n
As he worked on the book, continuing to write after his release on 20 December 1924, Hitler began to take it away from the original concept of an \u201caccounting\u201d with the people he blamed for frustrating his attempt at a coup in 1923. Short of money, and keen to establish his political credentials as leader of the ultra right in Germany, he decided to publish the book in two volumes, of which the first, more autobiographical one, came out on 18 July 1925 and the second, more programmatical one, on 10 December 1926. Hess and his wife, Ilse, along with an editor at the V\u00f6lkischer Beobachter newspaper, devoted many hours to correcting the many linguistic mistakes and infelicities in the script and the proofs.<\/p>\n
The Beer Hall Putsch and Hitler\u2019s subsequent trial for treason had transformed him from a local politician mainly known in Bavaria into a nationally notorious far-right agitator. But Mein Kampf was still fairly limited in its impact \u2013 hardly surprising, since the Nazis won less than 3 per cent of the vote in the national elections of 1928. Nevertheless, his newly acquired notoriety ensured that the first printing of volume one \u2013 10,000 copies \u2013 was almost sold out by the end of 1925 and was quickly reprinted. Evidently readers were keen to know who Hitler was and where he came from. Lacking the autobiographical element, volume two did not do nearly so well. But a \u201cpopular\u201d one-volume edition published in 1930, at a time when the Nazis were rapidly gaining support, sold 228,000 copies by the end of 1932. By this time the party had risen to become the largest in the Reichstag, the national legislature.<\/p>\n
Appointed head of a national coalition government on 30 January 1933, Hitler intimidated and outmanoeuvered his conservative-nationalist coalition partners and established a one-party dictatorship by the summer of 1933. Mein Kampf now became a key symbol of the ruling Nazi Party. Although sales to the general public fell off sharply after the first months of the regime, the book sold some 12.5 million copies between its publication and the end of Hitler\u2019s self-styled \u201cThird Reich\u201d in 1945. There were deluxe editions, a braille edition for blind readers, and an edition printed on especially thin paper for soldiers to carry with them when they went into battle to ensure they knew what, and whom, they were fighting for. Altogether, eight million copies were printed during the war. Symbolically, as Hitler began to redefine the war as a struggle for Western civilisation against the Bolshevik hordes, instead of a drive for Germany\u2019s world domination, he decreed that the book should be printed in a roman typeface instead of the previously employed gothic one, known as Fraktur and employed mainly in Germany.<\/p>\n
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