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‘Mein Kampf’ Is No. 2 Bestseller in Germany; Dalai Lama’s Book Comes in at No. 3

A new, almost 2,000-page annotated version of Mein Kampf is going hot off the shelves in Germany

by
Jonathan Zalman
February 24, 2016
(Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images)Mein Kampf
A German edition of Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' (My Struggle) is pictured at the Berlin Central and Regional Library (Zentrale Landesbibliothek, ZLB) in Berlin, Germany, December 7, 2015. (Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images)(Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images)Mein Kampf
(Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images)Mein Kampf
A German edition of Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' (My Struggle) is pictured at the Berlin Central and Regional Library (Zentrale Landesbibliothek, ZLB) in Berlin, Germany, December 7, 2015. (Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images)(Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images)Mein Kampf

Now that the (Bavaria-held) copyright has expired on Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic volume, Mein Kampf is back in stores in Germany. Republication of the Hitler’s hateful work, which he wrote in prison in 1923 (it was published in 1925) has been banned since the author’s death in 1945. The new version, a near-2,000-page annotated version, sold out within the first week of its publishing this year. (15,000 advance orders were made).

Now, Mein Kampf is a bestseller in Germany, where it sits at No. 2 on Der Spiegel’s bestseller list. For what it’s worth, the Dalai Lama’s Ethics Are More Important Than Religion comes in at No. 3 on the list. (In 2014, Mein Kampf was a hot iTunes seller.)

Of course, Germans and anybody else with some Internet acumen can procure a free copy of Mein Kampf, so they can appreciate passages like,

Let the desolation which Jewish hybridization daily visits on our nation be clearly seen, this blood-poisoning that can be removed from our body national only after centuries or nevermore; let it be pondered, further, how racial decay drags down, indeed often annuls, the final Aryan values of our German nation, so that our force as a culture-bearing people is visibly more and more in retreat and we run the great danger of ending up, at least in our great cities, where southern Italy already is today. This infection of our blood, which hundreds of thousands of our people overlook as though blind, is, moreover, promoted systematically by the Jews today. Systematically these black parasites of the nations ravish our innocent young…

To hold it in your hands, right? Wrong. Save your $65, or just don’t ban the book in the first place.

Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.