The Unexpurgated Mein Kampf

THE UNEXPURGATED MEIN KAMPF" HERBERT L. STEWART .1 am in a state of innocence: I know no difference between good and evil. -Bishop Nicholas, in Ibsen's PrtJtndtrs. AGERMAN autobiography, in two different English translations, has reached us, with surely the most singular notice to recommend it which even the "jacket" of a publishing house has yet displayed . Messrs Reynal and Hitchcock beg us to bear in mind that all profits from the sales of their version will be applied for the benefit of the author's unhappy victims, while from StackpoleSons, although they do not undertake to apply profits in that way, we have at least the assurance that no share in them will go to the author. Each publisher intimates that the new translation, unlike its predecessors, is "complete"-a point which it seems quite natural to emphasize. But the further epithet, "unexpurgated," on which each relies to secure a sale, is a distinct novelty in the advertisement of a book by the living ruler of a great nation in Europe. The translators have rendered signal service in reproducing for the English reader the full text of that strange manifesto, some of whose contents it is urgent that the foreigner should see, (or just the same cause which makes the Nazi enthusiast wish to conceal them. In no ordinary or conventional sense is the public indebted for such timely work, so admirably done. To the book thus pressed upon our notice, with the twofold recommendation that no translator or editor has abated the grossness of its original, and that no one who buys a copy will by this act financially benefit the author, I propose to devote a few pages of criticism. I The name, at least, is well chosen. Here is the record of a "struggle" by Adolf Hitler to change the ,thos of his fellow-count ry_ men, whose spirit he observed to be in a state of decline in the years which immediately foUowed the Great War. He would reawaken *Mt;n KampJ, by Adolph Hitler, Reynal and Hitchcock (Toronto, McClcUand and Stewart), 1939, $3.00. Mein Kampf, by Adolph Hitler, Stackpole Sons, 1939, $3.00. 385 386 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY in their minds belief in the superior rights of their own race, in the duty of national self-assertion which this should impose, and in the ruthlessness needful to make it effective. How much sacrifice such change will demand in the tradition of the Christian Ages to which Germany once paid homage-a tradition of justice, mercy, mutual considerateness, good faith-is here made plain. Mein Kampf, iDustrating General Ludendorff's thesis that "Christianity is incompatible with the new German national purpose," shows why such men as Pastor Niemoeller, Cardinal Faulhaber, Archbishop Waitz, and Karl Barth have been either silenced or intimidated. It should likewise prove illuminating to tourists who, of late, have returned in such numbers from Germany, reporting how they heard everywhere, "Hitler gave us back our self-respect." They will discover (rom it just what Hitler has aimed to give back to his countrymen, what forms of thought and feeling and purpose he would reinspire in those from whom they had temporarily faded. It should show them how the self-respect which under the Weimar Republic had been lost, and under the TJurd Reich has returned, is not to be understood in terms of the familiar interpretation by our "broader-minded" British or American publicists: how it is quite unconnected with the intolerable indignity· of Versailles, the monstrous figure set for Reparations, the occupation of the Ruhr, the behaviour of Senegalese troops at Cologne, and other matters of glib reproach against Great Britain and France. Thanks to Hitler's outspoken detail, and to the care with which 'the new translators have avoided expurgation, we know the sense in which their Fuehrer has bidden Germans respect themselves, and we realize the natural consequence of that mood for others. We have had examples, too. The fate of Czechoslovakia, the pogrom continuing year by year against Jews, the menace (growing darker and darker just now) to Poland, supply illustration for the chapter entitled "People and Race." In it Hitler develops into definite...