‘Mein Kampf’: the story of Hitler’s book displayed by deputy in Mato Grosso do Sul – 03/08/2023 – Politics

A state deputy from Mato Grosso do Sul exhibited the book Mein Kampf (My Struggle, in German), written by Adolf Hitler, during a session at the State Legislative Assembly. João Henrique Catan (PL), complained about a supposed ban on the book.

“A judge, perhaps more dictator than Adolf Hitler, suspended the entry and sales of the Mein Kampf“, he said. “Here [Hitler] depicts their strategies to annihilate, shoot down Parliament and the rights of popular demonstration.”

In reality, there is no prohibition in Brazil — the book written by Hitler has copyright in the public domain since 2015 and is freely traded in Brazil.

What is prohibited by law is to propagandize Nazism. Law 7.716/89 determines that it is a crime to “manufacture, commercialize, distribute or convey symbols, emblems, ornaments, badges or advertising that use the swastika or swastika cross, for the purposes of disseminating Nazism”.

The BBC reached out to Catan for comment on the matter, but had not heard back by the time this report was published. He told CNN that he actually used the book to “criticize Hitler’s strategies” to “nullify parliament” and “corrupt democracy”, comparing the German dictator to the state legislature.

But after all, what does the book say and what is its place in history?

What does ‘Mein Kampf’ say

O Mein Kampf is an autobiographical book and political manifesto by Adolf Hitler published in 1925, eight years before his coming to power in 1933.

Hitler’s Nazi government was responsible for the murder of an estimated 6 million Jews, including children, in the Holocaust.

In addition to Jews, Nazism also promoted the persecution and extermination of thousands of people with disabilities, Slavs (such as Russians and Poles), gay men, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people from the Romani people (formerly known as Gypsies), civilians from USSR and prisoners of war – number exceeding 10 million people, according to the best historical estimates.

Hitler began writing the text in prison in 1924, when he was being held after a failed coup attempt in 1923.

Edited by his deputy leader Rudolf Hess, the book initially sold poorly, but after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, it became a bestseller in the country.

In the book, Hitler talks about his childhood, his personal trajectory until then, his plans for Germany, his anti-Semitism and his anti-communism.

He blames the Jews, Marxists and Parliament for the problems faced by the country during the Weimar Republic (which had begun in 1918 and would last until 1933, when Hitler came to power).

Anti-Semitism is one of the central themes of the work, according to the work of British historian Ian Kershaw, one of the world’s leading experts on World War III and Nazism.

While demonstrating his hatred of the Jewish people, Hitler saw the Jews as “almighty”, explained Kershaw. The Nazi wrote that Jews controlled both Western capitalism and communism in the Soviet Union and were responsible for “destroying Germany”.

Hitler claimed that there was an “Aryan” people superior to other races and groups that he considered weak and inferior.

In the book, he also advocated the colonization and domination of neighboring territories to “realize Germany’s full potential” – the “living space” theory that was one of the foundations of Nazi Germany’s expansionism, culminating in World War II – and described his vision for the organization of Nazism and the performance of the party.

The book after World War II

At the end of World War II, Hitler killed himself to avoid capture. The book’s copyright passed to the State of Bavaria, which did not allow new editions to be published for fear of its power to incite hatred.

At the end of 2015, the rights to the work fell into the public domain. In some countries its recirculation has been restricted. In France and Germany, critical annotated versions were published.

Despite its historical importance, Hitler’s book is considered a work of little literary relevance.

The text received negative reviews even from Nazi allies. According to the biography of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini published by Denis Mack Smith in 1983, the fascist dictator is said to have said that the book was so “boring” that he had not been able to read it to the end and that it was full of ideas that were “nothing more than what common sense clichés”.

Since the end of the war, the book has been extensively studied by researchers from diverse schools of thought, from conservatives like Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddih to progressives like George Orwell.

According to historian Ian Kershaw, although the figure of Hitler is “unique” and he was a central driving force, we should not reduce the Nazi horrors to his figure, it is important to study the context of the time more broadly.

“Hitler was a political fanatic with immense state power, not a madman,” he said in a lecture broadcast on BBC Radio Four in 2005.

“But the particularity of the Nazi dictatorship can be explained less [pelo caráter de Hitler e mais] by the specific form of government it embodied and its corrupting effect on the instruments and mechanisms of the state,” Kershaw said in a 2009 interview.

“Both the widespread acceptance of the ‘project’ of ‘national salvation’, seen as embodied in Hitler, and the internalization of ideological goals by a new and modern power elite, operating alongside weakened old elites through the bureaucratic sophistication of a modern state, were necessary (for Nazism to have reached where it has),” he said.

This text was originally published here