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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone here actually read Mein Kampf? Doing so is probably banned in Germany and I am not sure what there is other than kiddie porn or some al-qaeda training manual that you totally would not want in your browsing history. There could come a time when no living person has read Mein Kampf and nobody would know first hand why it is wrong.

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It is not banned in Germany, though there obviously exists a stromg social stigma if you chose to display it in your living room.

The legal situation is this:

The free state of Bavaria has inherited Hitler's assets. Including the copyright to My Kampf.

Bavaria does not allow any reprints, unless for scientific purposes with commentary alongside the text. Obviously publishers abroad don't always care about that.

(Interestingly, publication in the US and England is actually legal, since the rights to publish in English were sold long before Hitler's death).

Other than that copyright issue there is no legal mechanism in place to ban Mein Kampf. People have been buying, bequeathing and selling unannotated versions (of which there are many around, the Third Reich isn't some fantastically distant past, after all!) without problems.

The question that has been popping up in political circles every now and then and that has reached some urgency now is how to proceed.

Because Hitler died in 1945, his copyright ends on January 1st, 2016.

There are people calling for special legislative action, but I doubt it's coming.

Yes, I have (yay protection of free speech!) and it is dreadfully boring.

It is amazing though how it pretty much spells out exactly what he would end up doing once he took power, in all the horrid detail, and yet some politicians of the time believed that simple appeasement would work...

As someone else here said, the lesson is that crazy people sometimes mean what they say, even when it sounds totally crazy.

It's like here in the UK millions of people voted Lib Dem without reading the Orange Book, then were surprised that they're actually to the right of the Tories.

>>As someone else here said, the lesson is that crazy people sometimes mean what they say, even when it sounds totally crazy.

Yeah, the challenge is to figure out which crazy people are actually crazy and mean what they say, and which ones say crazy things simply to gain votes.

But that is true of all such literature. The little Red Book, The Communist manifesto, Mein Kampf, the Quran, all of these books are boring to the point that despite their historical influence, and the massacres ascribed to them, it is a real struggle to get through them.

Well, at least most of them are really short.

The Communist Manifesto is a pamphlet and it contains a lot of great quotable passages. The Little Red Book contains contains quotes and proverbs from Mao. The Quran.. you can hardly say that it is boring. Your book comparison is just wrong. If you want to compare Mein Kampf to something, then Josef Stalin wrotes some tomes which are dreadful.

Mein campf is ... well, it's rambling. Think one of those internet "we didn't land on the moon, climate is bad, boo immigrants" texts rambling. The quran is rambling too, but of a different kind. "you must do X, you can't do Y, he must do Z, if you do A, B and C you'll be rewarded". It'd be fine, but it's 50 freaking pages of that. Why are you claiming "boring" is an unfair assessment of this ?

I'm unsure what the definition of pamphlet is, but the communist manifesto definitely exceeds what I'd consider length limits for pamphlets.

Trying to make some kind of comparison between Mein Kampf and the Quran (and by extension, the Torah and the Bible since they contain much the same content) is beyond idiotic. Have you really read either of the Quran and/or Mein Kampf?

The definition of a pamphlet is an unbound booklet, which is how the Manifesto was originally printed. It's length was 23 pages.

You're way off base as it pertains to most of the world.

Having anything about Mein Kampf in your browser history is absolutely zero problem in the US at least.

You could read about Hitler and read his book all day long if you like, nothing will come of it. Not an exaggeration, not a joke.

Mein Kampf can be purchased at just about any major bookstore in the US. Very few people in this country would find it weird or shocking if you read that book. If you proclaim an association with his ideas or the Nazi movement, that's an entirely different matter.

It is required reading in many university courses that cover that time period. Nothing is really taboo when trying to understand the past as it actually was than how we would rather remember it.

The annotated version is legal, the unannotated version is illegal.

What's the difference between the two editions? I can't imagine what these added annotations are about that make the book legal. Is it the occasional "Editor's note: genocide is very naughty"?

They turn it from something someone might take seriously into a piece of history.

People tend to take author's ideas at face value. The annotations change the "face" of the author.

No version is illegal in Germany. You may buy it, you may own it, you may read it, you may sell it.

I read it as part of a school project.

You can easily find the English edition online.

It's dull. I don't think anyone has actually finished it. That's why Orwell spent more time reviewing the photograph on the latest British edition than the book itself. He probably put it down by page 20.

Hitler's Table Talk is a far more interesting read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler's_Table_Talk

>Doing so is probably banned in Germany and I am not sure what there is other than kiddie porn or some al-qaeda training manual that you totally would not want in your browsing history.

So, merely reading it transforms you into a monster?

Not wanting something in your browsing history ≠ reading it will turn you into a monster.

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