My struggle

My fight (in German : Mein Kampf ) is a book written by Adolf Hitler , combining autobiographical elements with an exposition of ideas proper to the political ideology of National Socialism . The first edition was launched on 18 July as as 1925 .

Contents

The book outlines the main ideas that the German regime would bring to completion during his rule. Especially prominent is the love for the German people of Hitler , accepting among other theories the protocols of the sages of Zion . For example, it denounced that Esperanto was part of a Jewish plot , and argues about the old German nationalist idea of Drang nach Osten : (‘Encourages towards the east’) the necessity to gain Lebensraum (‘vital space’) towards the east , Especially in Russia .

Hitler used the main theses of the “Jewish peril”, which spoke of a Jewish conspiracy to gain world leadership. Yet he explains many details of Hitler ‘s childhood in the process by which he became increasingly anti- Semitic and militaristic , especially during his years in Vienna . In the second chapter, he writes about how he saw the Jews on the streets of the city, and then he asked himself, “Were those Germans?”

As far as political theories are concerned, Adolf Hitler describes his aversion to those he believes are the twin evils of the world: communism and Judaism , and stated that his purpose was to eradicate them from the Earth. He also announced that Germany needed to gain new territory: Lebensraum . This new land would feed the “historical destiny” of the German people; This goal explains why Hitler invades Europe , both east and west , before launching his attack on the Soviet Union .

Hitler presented himself as the Übermensch , often translated as ” superman, ” a term Friedrich Nietzsche employed in his writings, especially in the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra . For Nietzsche, the Übermensch is a person capable of generating his own system of values ​​identifying as good everything that comes from his genuine will to power .

Among the sources used by Adolf Hitler to write My Struggle is the book The International Jew: The First Problem of the World (1920), by the famous American industrialist Henry Ford , financier of Hitler and admirer of his ideas. ¹ Ford is precisely the only citizen of the United States cited by Hitler in his book.

Index of the book

The book was published in two volumes. The first appeared on July 18, 1925, entitled Retrospection; The second volume, published in 1926, was entitled “The National Socialist Movement”.

In the following years and these two volumes have been published in a single book.

History

Development

Hitler began writing the book in Landsberg Prison in May 1924, ^{2 3} after being sentenced to five years in prison for planning and executing the failed Munich coup . ⁴ In spite of his condemnation, Hitler counted on preferential treatment and received visits of admirers and gifts. ⁵ About the writing process, the most widespread opinion is that Hitler would have begun dictating the text to his driver, Emil Maurice , who would soon be replaced by his personal secretary, Rudolf Hess . ^{6 3} However, Ilse Pröhl, the future wife of Hess then collaborated with him reviewing the proofs of the book, ^seven said the prison was Hitler himself who was responsible for typing, ⁸ supported by the finding in 2006 version Five pages of the original text and eighteen sheets of erasers with Hitler’s handwritten corrections. ²

Hitler wrote most of the second volume in Berchtesgaden during two stays in the summers of 1925 and 1926, the first one housed in the Pension Moritz, owned by the Büchner couple, ⁹ and the second in the Deutsches Haus hotel. ¹⁰ In this second volume itself resorted to dictation and, although the identity of the typist of 1925 is not known, in 1926 the work was done Hertha Frey, who would become his personal secretary until 1930. ¹¹

Hitler had titled the book 4½ Jahre Kampf gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit ( Four and a half years of struggle against lies, stupidity and cowardice ), ^{December 3 to} but Max Amann , coordinator of Nazi publications, convinced him to reduce it to my fight . ^{3 14} Amann had hoped that Hitler wrote his autobiography and that focused on the coup in Munich, an event that had become famous nationwide the Nazi Party , and would probably be attractive to readers; ¹⁴ but Hitler barely made a mention of this episode. In the book, Hitler avoided the issue saying that the forces that repressed- the government , the police and the army Bavarian - had acted in good faith. Whereas some leaders of these forces were killed or sent to concentration camps when Hitler came to power, he most likely has eluded the issue so as not to prematurely antagonize these political forces. ¹⁴

Sales and popularity

In 1933, the year that Hitler came to power, sales soared and the book sold a million copies, a rhythm that retained until the fall of Nazi Germany , being the best selling book in this period, after the Bible . ¹⁵ Because Hitler’s main source of income was the sale of this book, in 1933 he became a millionaire and became the most prosperous German author. ^fifteenThe first volume of My Battle , 400 pages, was published on July 18, 1925 at the price of twelve reichsmark , about three US dollars at the time. ¹⁴ Although the Nazis claimed to have sold 24,000 copies in the first year, upward trend, the capture of documents by the Nazi publisher Eher -Verlag by the Allies in 1945 have denied these claims. ¹⁴ The book sold slowly and sales fell in the following years. On December 11, 1926 the second volume was published, ³ but sales fell to less than half compared to the previous year. However, with the onset of the Great Depression , the popularity of the Nazis increased , as did book sales. It may also have affected the fact that in 1930 a cheap edition of My Struggle was published . ^fifteen

During the government of Adolf Hitler , it was customary to give a copy of the book to the couple at their wedding, and to the students when they graduated. ¹⁵ At the end of the war had been distributed in Germany about 10 million copies of the book and had been translated into 16 languages.

Some historians have argued that a broad reading of the book might have alerted Hitler’s purposes , ¹⁵ but only one abridged version was published in English shortly before World War II . Even so, the editor of the English edition removed some of the anti- Semitic and militaristic claims . The publication of this version prompted Alan Cranston , an American journalist from the UPI in Germany and then a California senator , to publish his own annotated edition, which he believed reflected better the contents of the book. In 1939 he was sued by Hitler for copyright infringement and a Connecticut judge , United States, had to rule in his favor; The sale of the Cranston edition had to be discontinued after 500,000 copies had been sold.

The printing of this book is considered, by the laws of several countries, a federal crime, to which penalties can be applied that go from the payment of a small fine to several months of jail, unlike other books with extremist ideologies.

Translations

In 1941 the first and only complete Spanish translation of Mi lucha was published in Mexico . ¹⁶ In French the first complete translation of the book was published illegally in 1934 under the title of Mon Combat . ¹⁷

In English, a partial translation (two hundred and fifty pages compared to almost eight hundred of the original) was published in 1933 by Edgar Dugdale for the London-based publisher Hurst & Blackett. ¹⁸His title, My Struggle , became My Battle for the American edition published in Boston by Houghton Mifflin . ¹⁹ Dugdale’s version continued in circulation until 1939, when the publisher replaced it with a complete one made by James Murphy. ²⁰ In 1939 two other translations were also published in the United States; The first one directed by Alvin Johnson for New Yorker Reynal & Hitchcock and the second by Stackpole, which was withdrawn following the indictment of Houghton Mifflin, who owns the rights in the United States to Hitler’s work. ²¹ Houghton Mifflin later published, in 1943, a final translation of Ralph Manheim which has continued to be sold in English-speaking countries. ²²

Current availability

On April 30, 2015 at the 70th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s death, his book My Struggle came under the public domain .

The historian Werner Maser , in an interview with Bild am Sonntag has stated that Peter Raubal , son of the nephew of Hitler Leo Raubal , would have a solid case before it legal to get the copyright if I tried. Peter Raubal , an Austrian engineer , has stated that he does not want any part of book rights that could earn him millions of euros .

Until April 2015 the Bavarian regional government, in agreement with the Federal Government of Germany , did not allow any copy or printing of the book in Germany and opposed any edition in other countries, although with less success. In other countries owning and buying the book is usually legal. Trading with old copies is equally legal, unless war or racial hatred is advocated, issues that are often illegal in most countries of the world. Most German bookstores do not want to know anything about trading with this book, although many German libraries have versions with comments.

The uncertain situation has led to conflicting trials in Poland and Sweden . Mein Kampf , however, is published in the United States , as well as in other countries , such as Spain , Turkey and Israel , by publishers with diverse political positions. In contrast, in the Netherlands selling the book, even if being an old copy, is illegal and qualified as hate speech racial , but it is neither possess nor lend. In 1997 the government explained to parliament that selling a scientifically annotated version could escape the ban.

In 1999, the Simon Wiesenthal Center documented that major online bookstores such as Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com sold Mein Kampf in Germany . Following this complaint , the sale in Germany was interrupted.

Copies for free download of Mein Kampf are available on various Internet sites ; Some also sell copies of the book. Even so the edited copies are of doubtful reliability, since, for example, several references to Christianity are replaced by neopaganism .

In Argentina an edited version of the book has been reissued in 2016, which had considerable sales. ^{2. 3}

Sequel

After the Nazi Party lost the 1928 elections , Hitler believed that some reasons for his failure were that the public had not fully understood his ideas. For that reason he retired to Munich to dictate a continuation of the Mein Kampf focused on foreign policy . The book was never published, perhaps because of the low sales rate of its first book or because it revealed too many of its purposes. The book was kept by its publisher and was not discovered until 1958. ^{[ citation needed ]}

Notes

References