I finally got this book!I say "finally" because I pre-ordered it in mid-December 2015 and it should appear on January 8th. The publishing house decided to print only 4,000 copies, when the number of pre-orders allegedly was 15,000 at this point. The reprint seems to be running at full speed.Interestingly the book can currently not be ordered from Amazon, although they say on their website "The proceeds from the sale of this book through Amazon via www.amazon.de go to an organization committed for the benefit of victims of National Socialism."(They don't say which organization that is though)As always in such cases some shady businessmen appear offering the item in question via Amazon Marketplace at exorbitant prices. The offers range (as of today) from 175 EUR to 489 EUR, while the regular price is 59 EUR.About the book itself:It contains the complete text of Hitler's Mein Kampf together with a huge amount of scientific annotations that were made by a group of historians at the German Institute for Contemporary History. Click here for the description of the book on their website: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/?id=550 The result is a two-volume work with almost 2,000 pages. This photo should give you an idea of how big (and heavy) these books are (dollar-bill for scale):The main part has the following general structure:[click to enlarge]I added some highlighting:red = Hitler's orginal text (only on odd-numbered pages, on the right)yellow = differences/deletions made in the different editions of Mein Kampf together with the year they were made.blue = Annotations (referenced by footnotes) of which there are about 3,500. Not all pages are so full as seen here, but most of them are.As is usual in such a work, we also find a huge amount of additional information, a 90-page preface with essays and information about the original book, as well as a 250-page appendix.When and how I read this giant book, I have not decided yet.________________It took me almost two years after buying the book before I actually started reading, and another 196 days to finish it. Given that the critical/annotated/scholarly (or whatever you like to call it) edition has 1966 pages in two large volumes this means I only read 10 pages per day on average (I took some week long breaks). I can’t say I was eager to continue reading after a long day of work, and sometimes I had to force myself on weekends too. Nonetheless, I persevered, and I have to admit that this makes me a little proud of myself.Contrary to popular belief, Hitler’s book was not banned in Germany after the war and people were not punished for possessing and/or reading it. However, it was illegal to reissue Mein Kampf; not for ideological, but simply for copyright reasons. In 1948, copyrights were transferred to the state of Bavaria which also assumed legal succession and trusteeship of the original publisher (Eher Verlag, Munich), and they denied any attempt to re-publish the book. Under German law a copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author and because Hitler died in 1945 the copyright expired at the end of 2015. Therefore, as of 2016, the text is in the public domain in Germany. (BTW, for the same reason, access to gutenberg.org has been blocked in Germany, because of some books by authors for whom the copyright has not yet expired, namely Heinrich Mann (+1950), Thomas Mann (+1955), and Alfred Döblin (+1957)). After a long and controversial debate, in which emotions boiled up, the “Institute of Contemporary History” in Munich, issued this edition in January 2016. Read some of the articles before and after the publication here (mostly German, some English).Hitler wrote the first volume of Mein Kampf during his incarceration at the Landsberg penal facility. He was charged with high treason after the failed “Beer Hall Putsch” in 1924 and sentenced to five years of which he served only nine months before he was released for “good behaviour”. Hitler and his fellow conspirators (including his later deputy Rudolf Hess) had almost all the amenities and lived in this “fortress confinement” like in a hotel. In retrospect, this imprisonment was even a lucky break for Hitler. In addition to the propagandistic effect (the NSDAP party became much better known in public), it was above all the calm and repose in this “prison” that gave Hitler time to organize his thoughts and formulate his ideological world view. Part of the first volume is some kind of autobiography. At the time, writing a resume was part of rehabilitation and mandatory for inmates. There are contradictory statements about the exact development of the book and Hitler himself has commented on this only very little. The genesis, as far as it is known, is discussed in the introduction.I think it’s fair to say that Mein Kampf is one of those books everyone has heard about, and to which almost everyone has an opinion, but hardly anyone has ever read completely. I happened to come into possession of an original 1936-edition but I doubt I would have read more than three chapters of it. Is this an evil book? Or a dangerous one? Do you become a Nazi by reading it? Or are Nazis converted by reading this pamphlet? I think all these questions have to be answered with “No”. In my opinion, nationalist ideas are neither fueled nor diminished by a scientific edition like this one. One aim of the editors was to de=mystify Hitler and his work. It’s not always easy to disprove an ideologue who, with no great knowledge or education to speak of, but judge the world with great determination, in order to consider himself entitled to destroy worlds and create a new ones. Nevertheless, at least as far as I’m concerned, the editors have mainly achieved their goal.By all accounts Hitler was a successful speaker and gifted orator/actor. He was able to influence/manipulate large parts of the masses with his rhetoric in one form or another. It’s quite another thing to convey one’s thoughts in writing. Hitler once called himself a “political writer”. That's ridiculous. I can not remember ever having read a book that has such a weak prose. I refrain from giving examples(I do not want to quote Hitler), but especially the first volume is peppered with clumsy phrases that make one’s hair stand on end and I honestly do not understand why he didn’t hire a ghostwriter, or at least a good editor.But there are also some more or less consistent stylistic devices with which Hitler repeatedly works and which perfidiously even seem to fulfill their purpose: many repetitions (Hitler was clearly aware that this means of propaganda actually works); use of sentimental and affective terms; strong hyperboles (the stronger the better); biological vocabulary (such as “animals”, “vermin”, “eradicate” in connection with Jews); use of proverbs, sayings and quotes of great poets (Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare); use of negative connoted terms positively (for example, “brutal”, “ruthless”) [on the other Hitler uses “dictatorship” only in a negative sense against his enemies (like “dictatorship of the proletariat”, “world dictatorship of the Jews”]; nominal style (Hitler loved nouns); rhetorical questions with direct answers; modal particles usually only found in speech; many repetitions.It is also typical and characteristic of Hitler’s argumentation technique that he speaks of “countless examples” in political or historical references, which would allegedly illustrate the correctness of his statements, but not give a single one. Another re-appearing kind of character is “destiny” or “fate” which comes around and explains things that are otherwise unexplainable.The whole style has one advantage: There’s hardly any subtext to interpret. You can take Hitler at face-value, as history has shown in a frightening way. Unfortunately not many people did that at the time of publication when it was still possible to eradicate this still rather fragile movement.The entire 780 pages of Mein Kampf essentially revolve around these two core themes: Hatred of the Jews and Lebensraum in the East. Again and again Hitler returns to these topics from different angles.Jews were Hitler’s number one enemy. The other enemies, such as the capitalists, the left-wing political groups (all of which were subsumed under “Marxists”), and the critical (“lying”) press, were also interspersed with Jews and only served a “Jewish world revolution”. For Hitler, Jews were an inferior race that had to be “eradicated”, because only the toughest race could win the fight for survival, and of course that’s what the Aryans are for him. Elsewhere he certifies that the Jewish race has a self-preservation instinct stronger than any other. There are several contradictions of this kind, this Double=think, to be found in Hitler’s book and are wonderfully emphasized in the critical edition.For Hitler, at the time of writing Mein Kampf, Germany lay on the ground, was, in his eyes, crippled. The lost First World War (1918), the November Revolution (1918/19), the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and the occupation of the Ruhr area (1923/25) - all of these were prove for the imminent downfall of Germany and its people. Only a strong leader would be able to counteract this downfall and make Germany great again. And, of course, this leader can only be himself, even if he does not explicitly say so (here we have a little subtext). In order to resurrect Germany, “living space” must be gained. This was out of the question for Hitler. A war against Russia, as well as the annihilation of the “hereditary enemy” France, was imperative to achieve this goal. (As a precaution, the passage on France was removed from the French translation) For this, Hitler was even prepared to make alliances with Italy and England. He desperately wanted a new war - that can not be interpreted any differently while reading.Although Mein Kampf was not the exact blueprint for Hitler’s later reign, the book establishs an ideological framework from which he didn’t deviate until the very end in the bunker in Berlin in 1945. He himself speaks of a “granite foundation” of his world view, which he already acquired at the age of 20. Others speak of an “early solidification”, an attitude of intransigence, stubbornness, narrow-mindedness, and mental immobility that is usually, if ever, more likely to affect older people (senile stubbornness).The most important part of this edition are the army of footnotes “surrounding the text like sentinels over the scandalous writing”. There are more than 3500 of them, so on average 4.5 footnotes per page of Mein Kampf. They serve both as contextualization, as well as correction of innumerable insinuations and flat mistakes of the text and at the times where Hitler got something right, the annotations provide further facts that were conveniently left out and put things into perspective. Each footnote is provided with at least one reference to a source, the bibliography or another place in Mein Kampf. I can not imagine what a Herculean task was accomplished here. The acknowledgments at the end of the book mention the many topics that needed expert advice. And there were many, many, many people involved in the production of the complete work!The sheer amount of footnotes may look intimidating to the reader at first. For example, if you turn a page and see the following text that awaits reading, you might feel like quitting. That’s when I usually took a break (of days, sometimes weeks), waiting for my motivation to return to finish the book.It has been argued that the annotations would “dignify Hitler’s world view by embedding his anti-Semitic clichés in well-established intellectual traditions.” I felt differently. The book calls a spade a spade, where necessary. Hitler was not born anit-Semit. He had his sources. And they are called by name, wherever possible. What’s wrong with that? In fact, that’s exactly the point of de-mystification to me. In January 2016, when the book was presented to the public, Ian Kershaw (author of a two-volume Hitler biography) also spoke and found only praising words for this edition. He said it would be “indispensable for future Hitler research.”I pondered a while about how or if I should rate this book, the critical edition of Mein Kampf. How do you judge a book whose text belongs to the worst I ever read (in content and form), but whose annotations and further information are valuable enough to give it four or even five stars? An average of two or three does not seem right to me either – lukewarm somehow. In the end, I opted for the worst possible rating. The main reason for this was that this edition was merged with all other editions of Mein Kampf ( this is according to some GR policy and contrary to the librarian note I made when creating the book on GR ). By giving the book a higher rating I would only increase the already way too high average of 3.14 (from 23,604 ratings). So, here we have the rare, and probably unique, case where I recommend a book that I rated with one star to anyone who is interested in German (and world) history and prepared to dig through this monster. Of course, this recommendation only applies for the critical edition!This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License