{"id":157814,"date":"2014-07-11T15:00:09","date_gmt":"2014-07-11T12:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/tr\/content\/?p=9738"},"modified":"2014-07-11T15:00:09","modified_gmt":"2014-07-11T12:00:09","slug":"censoring-mein-kampf-or-anything-simply-makes-its-ugly-ideas-more-attractive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2014\/07\/11\/censoring-mein-kampf-or-anything-simply-makes-its-ugly-ideas-more-attractive\/","title":{"rendered":"Censoring Mein Kampf \u2013 or anything \u2013 simply makes its ugly ideas more attractive"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Kate Maltby<\/span> History<\/span> Last updated: July 4th, 2014<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Is this the Summer of Censorship<\/span>? In the US, it emerged that the NBC network requested a film trailer remove the word \u201cabortion\u201d in order to be advertised on its website. From New York<\/span> to Tel Aviv, there are calls to scrap the Metropolitan Opera\u2019s production of \u201cThe Death of Klinghoffer\u201d, lest it \u201cinflame anti-Semitism\u201d. Here in Britain, we\u2019re being urged to ban junk food advertising full-stop, the same week as the \u201cRight To Be Forgotten\u201d came into force, which allows those wealthy and clued-up enough to sue internet search engines<\/span> into removing information they find embarrassing from search results, however accurate that information may be. So major newspapers are being informed their content will not be displayed on Google, but in the interests of privacy, they can\u2019t be informed why, or who requested the block. It\u2019s a misnomer, another instance of what I\u2019ve called our chronic addiction to the language of rights. Hear a mention of a \u201cright to be forgotten\u201d on the radio, and who could possibly object? Rephrase it as \u201cthe right to forget Robert Peston\u2019s exposure of the financial crisis\u201d, or as Mark Stephens calls it, \u201cthe right to burn the index cards in a library of record\u201d, and it suddenly sounds a lot more sinister.<\/p>\n

But the\u00a0 biggest censorship row brewing is one of our oldest. A few years ago, I struck up a conversation with a jovial bookseller in Istanbul. We were talking in German, which was quicker for him than English, and closer to the realms of possibility for me than Turkish. Having established, therefore, my interest in Germany, his eyes lit up. \u201cAh! I have a real secret for you. It\u2019s banned in Germany, you know. The Jews won\u2019t let you read it.\u201d And as I bristled in doorway, uncertain whether how safely I would walk the streets of Ca\u011falo\u011flu if I confronted him on his own turf, my formerly charming companion pressed into my hands a shiny, newly published copy of Hitler\u2019s Mein Kampf.<\/em><\/p>\n

I thought of my Turkish encounter this week, as it emerged that the Interior Ministers of the 16 German L\u00e4nder <\/em>have just agreed to do their utmost to continue the legal injunctions on publications of Mein Kampf<\/em> in Germany after copyright expires on the first day of 2016. Currently, the state of Bavaria owns the literary estate of Adolf Hitler<\/span>, and limits publication in Germany to a few excerpts for official history<\/span> textbooks. As Sally McGrane reports in The New Yorker, the state has even withdrawn support for an academic edition which plans to publish the text with heavily critical annotations. For example, the passage in which Hitler complains about the treatment of First World<\/span> War veterans will be accompanied by a reminder that his own regime would later gas 5,000 shell-shocked veterans of that war under his euthanasia plan. But even this official history is an allowance too far for the Bavarian state, which withdrew its authorisation last December (though it gave up on reclaiming its money). The highly respected Institute for Contemporary History is pressing ahead with the project nonetheless, and hopes that it will be able to publish after the copyright expires in 2016 \u2013 but the ongoing legal battles which inspired this week\u2019s announcement may yet see the Institute\u2019s years of academic study buried.<\/p>\n

Berlin\u2019s caginess over the issue is understandable \u2013 Hitler\u2019s legacy remains acutely sensitive in Germany, and in a nation which once centrally instituted state power to enact the most totalitarian of brutalities, the libertarian position of absolving the nation state any ongoing cultural responsibility chafes against a collective memory.\u00a0 To be more cynical, no politician wants to be the minister who brought back Mein Kampf<\/em>. And as McGrane\u2019s report makes clear, Germany is haunted by the image of \u201cNeo-Nazis handing out the book in school yards\u201d.<\/p>\n

But if there\u2019s a danger of Mein Kampf<\/em> flooding school libraries, it\u2019s not in Germany.\u00a0 In Turkey, where Israel<\/span> remains the local villain, the book is a best seller. And when I remember my friendly bookseller in Istanbul, I remember how sure he was that the ban would be the book\u2019s unique selling point, his absolute conviction that censorship implied conspiracy. The publication of Mein Kampf<\/em> may well be a traumatic moment for Germany internally. But as a leading player on the global stage<\/span>, it also has an international responsibility. Germany\u2019s leaders need to think about how the Mein Kampf <\/em>ban affects the Middle East, and what it says about the West\u2019s values of free speech<\/span>, at a time when we are constantly forced to defend ourselves against accusations of hypocrisy. I think I may explode if I hear one more activist claim that the West, collectively, discriminates against Islam, because we decline to ban blasphemy against the Prophet, while Germany maintains its bans against Holocaust Denial or publishing Mein Kampf. <\/em>This is the self-pity of the oppressor, demands for special treatment dressed up as victimhood. Germany\u2019s bans around Holocaust material are the exception in the West\u2019s approach to freedom of speech, not the rule. But they are a dangerous exception, undermining any claim that Western civilisation promotes an equal playing field of ideas.<\/p>\n

Mein Kampf <\/em>is, of course, unreadable. Seven hundred pages long in the official Nazi edition, it reminds me above all of the screed spewed out by Elliot Rodger, the mentally ill misogynist killer from California. It\u2019s as ragefully biographical \u2013 what McGrane generously calls \u201cbildungsroman style\u201d, and what nowadays would be a little-read livejournal entry \u2013 with chapters called \u201cIn the House of my Parents\u201d and \u201cYears of Study and Suffering in Vienna\u201d. If Hitler were female, he’d have included a chapter called “My Bitter First Period”. But even were Hitler’s prose peerless, it would remain important for us to engage with dangerous ideas. That\u2019s why I was horrified to learn earlier this term that at my own university, UCL, the student union<\/span> had taken it upon itself to ban a \u201cNietzsche Society\u201d, in so far as a pompous union has the power to do so. (Their published statement on the matter emphasises the union\u2019s dedication to \u201cfighting the root cause of fascism\u00a0<\/em>\u2014\u00a0capitalism\u201d<\/em>, <\/em>which is the Closing of the British Mind in a neat nutshell. I thought their job was to help students<\/span> support themselves).<\/em> When I was an undergraduate, I encountered Nietzsche seriously for the first time \u2013 and sure enough, I felt an odd thrill at finally hearing an intellectual explanation of a philosopher\u2019s name which had always evoked taboo. But there\u2019s nothing like spending hours jawing with purist 21-year-olds about every possible translation of die ewige Wiederkehr <\/em>to wean one away from fascism. Perhaps, if Germany really wants to neutralize the dangers of Mein Kampf<\/em>, it needs to institute a new set of punishments in schools. Force your kids to write out lines of Hitler\u2019s verbiage in detention, and there\u2019s no way they\u2019ll waste lunch breaks passing it round the playground.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Get the latest comment and analysis from the Telegraph<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kate Maltby History Last updated: July 4th, 2014 Is this the Summer of Censorship? In the US, it emerged that the NBC network requested a film trailer remove the word \u201cabortion\u201d in order to be advertised on its website. From New York to Tel Aviv, there are calls to scrap the Metropolitan Opera\u2019s production […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":98147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[9489,10304,1780,10305],"class_list":["post-157814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-adolf-hitler","tag-kavgam","tag-mein-kampf","tag-nyt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}