Academic and other responsible presses around the globe are struck with the following dilemma regarding important anti-Semitic tracts. On the one hand, such antisemitica are painful but crucial vehicles that keep a scholarly or general reading audience from merely dismissing antisemitica as an outmoded, irrational type of bygone foolishness which need not concern contemporary serious discussion or engagement.  On the other, the publisher unintentionally risks breathing new life into texts and figures otherwise consigned to obscurity or general stigmatization.  Of course, German anti-Semitic texts take on a special valence in terms of potential public appeal.  There are several modern German writers whom I would deem to be be required reading for anyone student, or citizen,  interested in grasping the power and logic of antisemitism: Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s Judaism Unmasked (1700), Wilhelm Marr’s The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism, 1879 (by the man who coined the term Antisemitismus), Richard Wagner’s “Judaism/Jewry in Music,” Paul de Lagarde’s “German Writings” (1878), Heinrich von Treitschke’s “A Word about Our Jews/Judaism (Judenthum)” (1880), Julius Langbahn’s Rembrandt as Teacher (1890), Houston Stewart Chamberlin’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) and Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the 20th Century (1930), just to name a few.  As a professor at Brandeis, I am obligated to expose students to such texts and try to present their structure, presuppositions and worldviews, as well as their reception and legacies, in a way which forces us to confront and take seriously the manifold systematics of hatred towards Jews and Judaism. Literature and film of course expand such a course of study as well.  Whenever I teach or write about these materials, I am always worried that the endeavor to engage these figures and texts in a serious way, some of my arguments and approaches may be utilized to bolster noxious forces of palpable hate and exclusionary violence.

The case of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle) raises such vexed issues to a whole new level, for there are very few texts in modern history as infamous as Adolf Hitler’s 1925 prison memoir and credo Mein Kampf.  And even though many historians have noted how few Germans—including many in the upper echelons of the nationalist sociality party and regime—actually read the work before and even during the Third Reich, it has been widely available for interested collectors and has become an ever-more ubiquitous presence on neo-Nazi websites.  

The state of Bavaria, which has held the copyright since 1945, has until recently barred other German publishers permission to put it back into circulation.  Despite its unavailability in a post-war edition, this hateful work has become fairly easy to find in one of the 12 million copies originally produced during the Third Reich, in addition to being accessible in one of the aforementioned websites.  Because German copyrights lapse 70 years after the death of the author, the Bavarian state government commissioned the academic Institute for Contemporary History (based in Berlin and Munich).  The institute was American, founded in 1949, and has often been a primary and a widely respected generator of academic research on national socialism. The original 700 page screed of Mein Kampf has now been expanded to an eye-popping annotated 2,000 pages.  The nearly 5,000 scholarly annotations are in great part intended to provide critical counter-claims to Hitler’s claims regarding politics, history, religion, future expectations for Germany and the world.  I agree with the historian Gavriel Rosenfeld at Fairfield University who suspects that such a new publication will make little impact in a larger public sphere dominated by the internet and its fascination with Hitler.  Even the planned follow-up electronic publication of the text will not deter German readers who wish to read the original unmediated by a critical apparatus.  

I sympathize with many Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities in Germany who are understandably upset and outraged by its republication. After all, Germany is responsible for initiating and implementing the persecution, incarceration and mass murder of homosexuals, Roma, communists and Jews, a fact which hangs an important weight over its collective consciousness. Living in Germany today brings with it many ambivalent attitudes to more theoretical academic exercises that take place in the relatively safe confines of North America.  I am, however, also a scholar and teacher devoted to contextualizing and engaging anti-Semitism within broader frameworks of history, culture and ideas.  Knowing that the text will surely be published by other less systematically responsible publishing efforts, I am glad that at least there will now be a critical framework for a new generation of German readers feeling the need to grapple with the heavy burden of this text and its associated legacy of mass murder and catastrophe.  

—Prof. Eugene R. Sheppard (GRALL, HIST, HOID, NEJS, PHIL) is an associate professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought