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New Statesman
2 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
What we can learn from Adolf Hitler
January 1936: German dictator Adolf Hitler (left, centre) walks down the centre of two files of guardsman in front of a huge swastika at a parade at the Lustgarten, Berlin. (Photo by) The strangest thing about this week's 100th anniversary of the publication of Mein Kampf is that it still matters. Not that anyone is reading that famously unreadable book. Hitler's original title was Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice, which conveys the spittle-flecked mood better than the alternative his publisher came up with. But the book and its author still haunt us. For very, very good reasons; even so, maybe it's time to move on. If in 1925 you'd asked people in Britain, Germany or anywhere in the North Atlantic world to name the most important moral figure in their culture – the human being who gave them a measure of good and evil – most of them would said, Jesus Christ. Atheists and agnostics as well as believers usually went out of their way to affirm that he was humanity's supreme moral exemplar. But ask the same question now, and our answer is the author of Mein Kampf. Plenty of people still believe Jesus is good, but not with the same fervour and absolute conviction that we believe Hitler is evil. The reason Holocaust denial is the only thing that, even now, can get you properly, all-but-universally 'cancelled' is that it is our modern equivalent of blasphemy: a denial of our deepest shared values, words that would only be spoken by a monster. You can joke around with crosses and crucifixes nowadays and no-one really minds; but there is no visual image in our world that packs a greater punch than a swastika. To understand the postwar era – as we still call it – we need to understand this: we have been living through the age of Hitler. The age when the man with the toothbrush moustache has dominated our moral imagination. We've used him and the Nazis to define evil for us. In a pluralist, relativist world, the fact that we all hate Nazis has become our one fixed point of reference. Which is great – as far as it goes. If you're going to pick one person to stand as a representative of absolute evil, I challenge you to find a better candidate. But let's be clear about what we've done and its consequences. We've swapped out a positive exemplar, who showed us what's good, for a negative one, who shows us what's evil. We're better at knowing what to hate than what to love. And now, all too obviously, those anti-Nazi taboos that we've built our values around since 1945 are crumbling. Which for those of us who've lived our lives swaddled in those moral certainties is properly scary, but it's not an accident. Nor is it just because the Second World War is falling off the edge of living memory. It's because we've taken an absolutely sound insight – that Hitler and the Nazis represent an exceptional evil – and we've tried to base our entire system of values on it. And it can't bear the weight. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe There are lots of signs of the problems this has caused. It's left us with a conviction that all evils look like Nazis: to the point when the most popular myths of the postwar world have been dominated by Dark Lords and ersatz Nazis, from Sauron and Darth Vader to the Daleks and Harry Potter's Death Eaters. Which is fine, until you have to face an evil that doesn't work that way, like economic injustice or the climate crisis, and you discover you don't have the tools. Remember when we tried to face down COVID by pretending it was a re-run of the Blitz? It's also left us with the instinct that the ideal way to defeat evil is to fight it, often in an actual war, just like we did with Hitler; and that the worst moral mistake we can make is appeasement. Whereas most wars of course cause more problems than they solve, and the fear of appeasement has led us into a series of disasters from Suez to Iraq. During the Cuban missile crisis, it almost killed us all. For the centre and centre-Left in our own times, our insistence on building our values exclusively around the anti-Nazi legacy poses a particularly painful problem. There's been a lot of talk in recent years about the 'crisis of conservatism', but it's worse than we think. It's not them: it's us. In the 2020s, as we ravel out the last threads of the postwar consensus, the Left have become the true conservatives: trying to preserve what we have or to recover what we fear we've lost, but wretchedly short of actual ambitions. To be in the centre or centre-Left nowadays is to believe that the world as it stands is about as good as it gets, bar a little managerial fine-tuning that never seems to seep out very far. We mostly just want to stop things getting too much worse, whether we are talking about climate, economics or rights. The political offer is, no disasters and the distant hope of an incremental increase in rations. Is it a surprise that a lot of the world is trying other options? In Britain, our poor government is endlessly berated for its inability to articulate a 'narrative', but it's not their fault. It's ours: democracy famously gives us what we deserve. They are faithfully expressing what were, until fairly recently, our shared core values, and trying as that consensus crumbles to find a line that they can hold. And they may or may not succeed in those terms, but of course they struggle to hold out a positive vision. We're not ready for one. 'All we want is someone competent', people say: and it's true. Our hopes really are that miserably limited. That old, anti-Nazi consensus they speak for knows what it hates, but not what it loves. We know what evil looks like – or one version of it, anyway – but we have a very impoverished notion of the good. The things that we do affirm – human rights, liberty – are quite deliberately vacant categories: their whole point is that they are undefined spaces in which individuals and communities can find what they love and pursue it. Which would be wonderful, if we gave any attention to empowering those individuals and communities to find things worth loving and actually to choose them. Otherwise freedom is just freedom to obey the algorithms. So there is good news: this whole situation is plainly untenable. Our attempt to build a whole system of values on the fact that we are not fascists is running out road. Various attempts to resolve this by doubling down on it, through purity tests, identity politics and the amplification of outrage, are not going terribly well. The taboos we've been trying to defend for a lifetime keep being broken, and monsters that we thought had had stakes driven through their hearts are shambling back into life. And if those monsters are growling that the old centre and Left have nothing to offer – merely 'project fear', or managerialism that's not actually very good at management – they are right. The only problem is, how do we stop them taking over? Well, we'd better find some actual, positive values from somewhere. The government can't do it for us: we have to do it for them. And since we seem to be the actual conservatives now, let's own it. The only way out of this a synthesis: to bring the indispensable insights of our anti-Nazi values, insights which the world bought at a terrible price, together with the wisdom of our deeper-rooted philosophical, cultural and – yes – religious traditions. Our anti-Nazi values set the ground rules: pluralism, human equality, rule of law. But the rooted traditions provide content for those empty vessels, and not just in the sense that they have deep wells of wisdom with which we can critically engage. They often offer suppleness: for example, the capacity to forgive and to repent, and to dodge the moral pitfalls that cluster around those manoeuvres – and those are essential operations which our anti-Nazi values find very difficult. They offer deeply unfashionable but surprisingly practical ethical techniques: for example, patience, humility, endurance and self-discipline, none of them qualities our culture is oversupplied with. And above all – which is what makes the whole business worth the trouble – they can offer us some beauty to spice all this tasteless technocratic gruel. Something worth loving, some good worth pursuing for its own sake, to go along with all the things that we know we have to be against. Indeed, they can remind us (since we have never quite forgotten) that our public, political life, important as it is, is only ever a means to an end, and that real human flourishing will come from somewhere else. They offer colour in place of all our ever-so-subtle shades of grey. Which is why I think not only that we should re-embrace these traditions, bringing with them all the hard-earned lessons that the twentieth century taught us, but that we will. Because whatever the future might hold for us, it is not a universalized metropolitan utopia of the kind visionary progressives have imagined and reimagined from Aldous Huxley to Star Trek. If you believe that human identities, particularities, traditions and spiritualities are going to fade away or become superficial quirks in a secular metropolitan soup, then you are living in a particular world indeed. Like it or not, these identities matter profoundly to most of humanity, even those of us who kid ourselves that our sophisticated and modern ways are above such things. Our options are to get the best we can out of those identities – and their best is very good indeed; or, to relinquish control over them, and ultimately of us all, to the trolls. There is not a third way. A hundred years on, let's stop just being proud of not having read Mein Kampf, and think about what we are reading instead. Alec Ryrie is the author of 'The Age of Hitler'. [See also: How the world stopped Hitler] Related
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First Post
2 days ago
- Politics
- First Post
History Today: When Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' was published for the first time
The autobiographical manifesto of Germany's Adolf Hitler was published for the first time on July 18, 1925. During its first year, the book sold 9,473 copies, while as many as 12 million copies were sold by the end of World War II read more Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf on display at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. File image/AP Adolf Hitler was a mysterious man with his own beliefs. Even now, his way of life and his beliefs intrigue people across the world. So, if you want to know about him, the best way is to read his autobiographical manifesto 'Mein Kampf', published on July 18, 1925. Written during his imprisonment at Landsberg Prison, the book combined Hitler's personal history, political ideology and vision for Germany's future. If you are a history geek who loves to learn about important events from the past, Firstpost Explainers' ongoing series, History Today, will be your one-stop destination to explore key events. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD On this day in 1976, Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci made history at the Montreal Summer Olympics by scoring the first-ever perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics. This event revolutionised the sport. Here is all that happened on this day. Mein Kampf was published The first volume of Adolf Hitler's infamous autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was published on July 18, 1925. He largely dictated the book while imprisoned in Landsberg Prison, serving a sentence for his role in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. The second volume followed in 1926. Mein Kampf laid out Hitler's core ideological tenets, including his virulent antisemitism, his concept of 'Lebensraum' (living space) for the German people in Eastern Europe, his disdain for parliamentary democracy, and his vision for a racially 'pure' Germany. It served as a chilling blueprint for the Nazi Party's agenda and the atrocities that would later unfold under his regime. The book 'Mein Kampf' is displayed behind bars at the Warmuseum Overloon in Overloon, Netherlands. File image/Reuters Initially, Mein Kampf had modest sales, but after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, it was heavily promoted and distributed widely across Nazi Germany. It became mandatory reading in schools and a common wedding gift, with over 12 million copies sold or distributed by the end of World War II. The book's publication marked the beginning of the mainstreaming of Nazi ideology, filled with dangerous propaganda that would later fuel the Holocaust, World War II, and the deaths of millions. Its anti-Semitic and ultranationalist rhetoric directly shaped Nazi policies and Hitler's totalitarian regime. After the war, the book was banned in several countries. In Germany, public printing and sale were prohibited for decades. When the copyright expired in 2015, a heavily annotated version was published by the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, sparking fresh debate on how to confront hate speech and historical responsibility. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Nadia scored a perfect 10 in the Olympics Gymnastics The world watched in wonder when the first perfect 10 was achieved by Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci on July 18, 1976, at the Montreal Olympic Games. Scoring a perfect score was so unheard of at the time that even the scoreboard was famously unprepared for such an achievement, flashing '1.00' because it could only display three digits. Nadia's performance marked a technical and artistic peak in gymnastics, combining impeccable form, daring difficulty and calm under pressure. But this was just the beginning. Over the course of the 1976 Games, she earned seven perfect 10s and won three gold medals in the individual all-around, uneven bars and balance beam categories, along with a silver and a bronze. She became the youngest Olympic gymnastics all-around champion in history at that time. Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci etched history on July 18, 1976, after scoring a perfect 10 during the Olympic Gymnastic sport. File image Her success transformed the global perception of gymnastics. Previously dominated by older athletes, the sport began to shift toward younger, more agile competitors. Nadia's composure, grace, and innovation inspired a generation of gymnasts and elevated the standard of excellence worldwide. Back home in Romania, Comaneci became a national hero, celebrated for both her athletic brilliance and the pride she brought to her country during the Cold War era. Internationally, she became a global icon of perfection, with her name forever etched in Olympic history. This Day, That Year On this day in 1944, Allied forces captured the French town of Saint-Lô, a vital communications centre, during World War II. French General Ferdinand Foch launched a counterstrike that forced the Germans into a hasty retreat during the Second Battle of the Marne on this day in 1918.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Riefenstahl' Trailer: Disturbing Documentary Portrait of Hitler's Favorite Filmmaker Resonates in the Present Moment
Her films were taught for decades in U.S. film schools for their pictographic excellence, her images bold and dramatic. The context in which they were made, however, was so difficult to justify that she became the furthest limit of the 'let's separate the art from the artist' ethos. Now, documentarian Andres Veiel has delivered a riveting cinematic portrait that looks deep into the meaning of Leni Riefenstahl, and how her work still uncomfortably echoes today. IndieWire exclusively debuts the trailer for 'Riefenstahl' below. The film will be released by Kino Lorber in New York on September 5 and in Los Angeles on September 12, with a national rollout to follow. More from IndieWire 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' Review: Fisherman Slasher Hooks a Salty and Satisfying Legacy Sequel 'Smurfs' Review: The Unkillable Blue Menaces Are More Insufferable Than Ever Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will' was a film school staple for much of the mid 20th century — it's how USC grad George Lucas came to pay homage to it with the mass gathering at the end of the original 'Star Wars.' And yet the 1935 film was based entirely around a stylized presentation of the previous year's Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, with 700,000 Nazis arranged in geometrically precise rows, all fanatically devoted as Adolf Hitler speaks at length. She treats the human form like architecture. Those overhead shots of the Nazis arrayed like a Mondrian painting. Her follow-up, a film that has an enduring impact easier to justify, her portrait of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, 'Olympia,' introduced tropes and techniques that have stuck with sports broadcasting to this day. Riefenstahl's reputation endured in part because she doggedly claimed she was just a fellow traveler of the Nazis, not a true believer. That she had never even read 'Mein Kampf.' That she was simply carried along by history like millions of fellow Germans. But Veiel makes a compelling case in 'Riefenstahl' that the director was, in fact, a fanatical Nazi, and until the end of her long life in 2003. She died at the age of 101. He finds proof that she had read 'Mein Kampf' and that she still courted the interest and regard of other unrepentant Nazis after the war. He even suggests that Riefenstahl may have been aware of the Nazis' atrocities, something she always insisted she was completely unaware of: He details how she accompanied the Wehrmacht in their invasion of Poland and possibly witnessed a massacre. The documentary also makes some compelling connections to the present moment. Riefenstahl was obsessed with surfaces, with beauty alone. Isn't her work similar to the Instagram ethos of pictographic attractiveness presented as an end unto itself without regard for context or deeper meaning? Perhaps a surface-level view of Riefenstahl's work is the only way to appreciate it. Unless a focus on surfaces alone is exactly what Fascism demands? Watch the trailer for 'Riefenstahl,' an IndieWire exclusive, below. Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie Nicolas Winding Refn's Favorite Films: 37 Movies the Director Wants You to See Solve the daily Crossword
The Independent
12-07-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
100 years of Mein Kampf: Why Hitler believed England to be his truest European ally
For 80 years, Germany has done everything it can to stamp out all vestiges of Nazism. It has told itself and the world that it, and only it, could have meted out such horror. The notion of Sonderweg, the special path, is deeply embedded. According to this reading of history, Germans followed a straight line from Bismarck to Hitler. We Brits love to hear this kind of thing: those pernicious Huns. We, by contrast, would never have succumbed. But having had the dubious honour of spending the last few months immersing myself in Mein Kampf, which was published a century ago next week, I am more convinced than ever that we are deluding ourselves. The same blithe over-confidence applies to Americans (indeed pretty much anyone). We are all prone to the most dangerous propaganda, extremism and hate, no matter where we come from. Before embarking on this assignment for a BBC radio documentary, I had never read Mein Kampf. No sensible person, apart from a history scholar, would have done. For me, it was a particularly unpleasant prospect given that my Jewish father fled Czechoslovakia shortly after Hitler had marched in and several members of his extended family were killed in the concentration camps. In Germany, the book has been taboo, subject not just to legal copyright restrictions (new versions could not be printed), but also to social shame. However, from India to Turkey and beyond, it has done a healthy trade around the world. It took me nerves of steel to plough through the more than 700 pages of this grubby work, 30 pages a night, with its endless distorted references to biology and race theory, with its warnings about miscegenation and the poisoning of good German blood. Much of it is predictable: a badly written mix of narcissistic autobiography and job application to lead Europe's nascent fascist movement. But, the main conclusion I drew from my research was that, just as Hitler's odious book was based around a cut and paste (not that typewriters of the 1920s were capable of such things) of late 19th- and early-20th-century race-based ideology, much of what is appearing online today in the 2020s follows the same path. It is part of a continuum. With the help of Dr Simon Strich, an academic from the University of Potsdam, I traced a direct line between many of the ideas contained in Mein Kampf to videos on current YouTube, popular podcasts and social media posts, many of them with millions of hits and clicks. From that, you can move to speeches from the likes of Hungary's Viktor Orban, Italy's Giorgia Meloni and (you guessed it), Donald Trump. Consider this: 'They're destroying the blood of our country, that's what they're doing. They're destroying our country. They don't like it when I said that. And I never read Mein Kampf. They said, 'Oh, Hitler said that, in a much different way'.' That was Trump during an election campaign rally in December 2023. There are a number of other examples that I could have cited. Then run alongside it the following: 'The poisonings of the blood which have befallen our people … have led not only to a decomposition of our blood, but also of our soul.' Mein Kampf, chapter two of volume two. Again, there were plenty of contemporary examples to choose from. Or this, from Orban, telling an audience in July 2022 that it is acceptable for Europeans to mix with each other – but not with those arriving from outside. 'We are not mixed race,' he says, 'We do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.' Then stand it alongside this sentence in chapter 11 of Mein Kampf, entitled People and Race: 'Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures.' And what of Elon Musk? While he was Trump's right-hand man, he was conducting an interview with Alice Weidel, leader of Germany's far-right AfD, in which the only criticism they could find for Hitler was that he was a 'Communist'. History is clearly not their forte. Now, even as Musk is cast into the Trumpian wilderness, the X's AI chatbot showers praise on the Fuhrer. All it was doing was reproducing much of the bile that appears on his very own social media platform. 'Mein Kampf is not special,' Strich tells me as we dart from one grisly website to the next. 'There are a million different versions of the same material, the same ideology out there.' The most intriguing aspect for me was Hitler's loathing of the French and his respect for the English, even when expressed through suspicion. When musing about Lebensraum, about the need for Germans to find new lands in the East, he believed there was only one like-minded country with whom he could strike a deal: 'For such a policy, there was but one ally in Europe: England.' In another section, he states: 'No sacrifice should have been too great for winning England's willingness. We should have renounced colonies and sea power, and spared English industry our competition.' We know what happened in the end. Once Churchill was at the helm, Britain played a heroic role in resisting Hitler. But history has a habit of simplifying, of drawing straight lines that do not necessarily exist. It wouldn't have taken much for the British or another country to embrace something hideous in the 1930s. And it wouldn't take much now.
Times
05-07-2025
- Politics
- Times
Mein Kampf at 100 — why the most reviled book in history still haunts us
Nuremberg, January 8, 1946. The British prosecutor Frederick Elwyn Jones opened the case against the 21 senior Nazis in the dock, charged with crimes against humanity. Eight months earlier Adolf Hitler had killed himself in his bunker; others close to him were dead or had absconded. It was vital that justice was seen to be done. There was no shortage of evidence of the Holocaust, of the slaughters of the Eastern Front and other war crimes. But one item had particular resonance. 'May it please the tribunal,' Jones said, 'it is now my duty to draw to the tribunal's attention a document which became the statement of faith of these defendants.' Mein Kampf is 100 years old this month. The centenary will reinforce Germans' determination to keep the odious book buried. But I recently set myself the task of understanding it better, to see what lessons it provides — not just for Germany, but for all countries. It was not a straightforward assignment. My Jewish father escaped Czechoslovakia by the skin of his teeth in the summer of 1939. Several members of his extended family were killed in the camps. He rarely spoke of his ordeal, and I never got to ask him about my strange surname. I had never read Mein Kampf. Almost nobody has, or says they have, although everyone knows the title. It took nerves of steel to plough through the 700-page tome, which is what I did, 30 pages a night, in German and then in English. My research also required some subterfuge, using the term 'MK' in emails to spare my interviewees any embarrassment. Hitler originally wanted to call his book Four and a Half Years (of Struggle) Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice but was persuaded to make it shorter. It is both a carefully crafted biography (riddled with inventions and falsifications) and a job application. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List The Germany of the 1920s was deeply unstable. Defeat in the First World War had changed everything. The Kaiserreich was no more, the army had been emasculated, the economy was in ruins. The new Weimar Republic, with its fragile parliamentary democracy, was for Hitler and his supporters a byword for weakness and decadence. In 1923 Hitler led the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. When it failed he was sent to jail, but given a light sentence and a large, comfortable cell. Landsberg prison may have been called a fortress, but for its most celebrated inmate it was more a political meeting room. 'Hitler made an announcement in a newspaper. He asked all his friends and politicians not to visit him any more,' says the German historian Othmar Plöckinger, author of a landmark study of Mein Kampf. 'He wanted now to start seriously writing his book.' He needed a manifesto to propel him on to the fragmented political scene. As well as repulsive, it is a curious book. It could have done with some serious editing. Much of the time the writing is repetitive and barely coherent. Sometimes Hitler veers into strange tangents on the Habsburg or Japanese empires. Some passages are moderately rational, but all too often the author can't help himself. There are 467 mentions of the word Jew or its derivations, 64 mentions of poison, 14 of parasite, 27 of disease and 167 of blood. Along with history, Hitler's main themes are sociology and a horrifically distorted understanding of biology. He borrows ideas from late-19th and early 20th-century ideologues such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British-French-German philosopher who propagated theories of ethno-nationalism and racial superiority that were standard at the time. Others, such as the political scientist Carl Schmitt, focused on the acquisition of power. Some ideas were copied; others, such as Charles Darwin's theory of evolution , were traduced to fit his agenda. Hitler saw the fate of people as being driven by the law of racial struggle; the stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker. 'Every animal mates only with a member of the same species. The titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse, the dormouse the dormouse, the wolf the she-wolf etc.' There are pages and pages of this stuff on racial purity, eugenics and the urgent need for Germans to acquire space to live, Lebensraum. For Hitler, Aryan supremacy was evident in all walks of life, from biology to high art. 'Everything we admire on this earth today — science and art, technology and inventions — is only the creative product of a few peoples and originally perhaps of one race.' He found many groups responsible for the humiliation of the German people, the Treaty of Versailles, the 'stab in the back'. He blamed the communists, the media, the liberal elite, homosexuals and the French. But he blamed one group in particular. 'Today it is difficult, if not impossible, for me to say when the word 'Jew' first gave me ground for special thoughts. For me this was the time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through. I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an antisemite.' There is worse, much worse, but I won't put readers through it. • The Nazi Mind by Laurence Rees review — warnings from history Volume one was published in July 1925. The first print run of 10,000 sold out within months. But sales quickly tailed off and the second volume, released a year later, fared much worse. Reviews ranged from supportive to outraged to dismissive. Cultured Germany wouldn't be taken in by such ramblings, was the prevailing response. But sales picked up again as Hitler closed in on power. After 1933 it was deemed patriotic to own a copy. Local councils were instructed to distribute it to married couples. As war loomed, soldiers were handed pocket versions; it became not so much something to read as a devotional object. Hitler received the royalties, and according to a 1939 article in Time magazine, the Führer had amassed more than $3 million (the equivalent of about $70 million today) from German sales alone. Versions in English and other languages tended to tighten up and sanitise the message. President Roosevelt — who came to power just a month after Hitler, and was fluent in German — scribbled this in his abridged 1933 translation: 'This translation is so expurgated as to give a wholly false view of what Hitler really is or says. The German original would make a different story.' On Germany's surrender, Hitler's assets were confiscated. The postwar authorities and the western Allies faced two competing priorities — de-Nazification and building democracy, in which freedom of expression was central. They came up with the ingenious idea of using copyright law: for the next 70 years it would be illegal to publish new versions of Mein Kampf in Germany, although it remained available around the world. It took much longer than non-Germans realise for Germany to reckon with its history. It wasn't until the late 1960s that a new generation started to confront their parents. Alongside discussion forums and TV talk shows, a new theatrical genre emerged. One of the first to deal directly with Mein Kampf was Helmut Qualtinger, an Austrian actor who read out excerpts on stage. In the 1990s a Turkish-born German comedian called Serdar Somuncu used ridicule and satire in a show called The Legacy of a Mass Murderer. Yasemin Yildiz, a cultural historian, describes the atmosphere: 'People were laughing out loud. He enabled them to have this bodily release through humour, which aimed to make Hitler smaller. A lot of the postwar period [had] dealt with this anxiety around him by making him demonic.' As for the book, many copies continued to sit in people's homes — sometimes stashed away in attics or cellars, coming to light only when the war generation passed on and their children or grandchildren went through their belongings. When the copyright ran out in 2015, a decision was taken to republish Mein Kampf, officially, under the watchful eye of experts at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. Their task would be to produce a critical edition, inserting notes on every page, detailing distortions, falsehoods and the ensuing horrors. It triggered an impassioned public debate, including within Germany's Jewish community. There was a flurry of sales in the first year or so of publication, largely to scholars or curious members of the public, but that didn't last. Job done? Not at all. You can find the book in shops, if you look hard enough, and more easily online, both the sanitised version and the original. But that, in my view, is the least of the problem. What I have found, during months of interviews and research, is that the messages contained in Mein Kampf have not gone away. They can be found all over the world on the internet; on YouTube and elsewhere bloggers, vloggers and agitators borrow the themes of the 1920s and 1930s. • Ideology is at the heart of terrorism, says extremism tsar They do not usually cite Mein Kampf directly. Perhaps they think it will taint them. Perhaps they think it's no longer relevant or cool. But its ideas have moved from the fringes into the mainstream. Comparing passages with speeches by leading American and European politicians, who talk of 'ethnic replacement' and 'poisoning the blood', there is a similar focus on grievance, resentment and encirclement. This includes speeches and social posts from Viktor Orban, Giorgia Meloni and Donald Trump. During a campaign rally in December 2023, the man who is now US president said: 'They're destroying the blood of our country, that's what they're doing. They're destroying our country. They don't like it when I said that. And I never read Mein Kampf. They said, 'Oh Hitler said that, in a much different way.'' There is more like it. Chapter two, volume two of Mein Kampf, titled The State, says: 'The poisonings of the blood which have befallen our people … have led not only to a decomposition of our blood, but also of our soul.' I know this is deeply contentious territory. I am fully aware that anyone cross-referencing modern-day populism with the 1920s and 1930s lays themselves open to being denounced as simplistic or plain wrong. No two political movements or historic moments are exactly alike. I am not trying to say that today's leaders will follow Hitler. Words don't inevitably lead to actions. But what I am saying is that, for all the efforts to eradicate this book's ideas, some of them have returned into the heart of global politics. Banning the spirit of Mein Kampf has turned out to be harder than anyone realised. Just as Hitler recycled existing material, so his book is being refashioned for our times. It's part of a continuum. His ideas have always been there, and they have never gone away. Archive on 4: 100 Years of Mein Kampf is on BBC Radio 4, Jul 5 at 8pm and then on BBC Sounds
