The power of the word

From ‘Mein Kampf’ to be published in Germany for first time since WWII by Yaron Steinbuch.

Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” will soon hit German bookstores — the first time the infamous manifesto has been printed in the country since the dictator’s death.

The copyright for the 1924 Nazi tome is now held by the state of Bavaria in Germany but will expire at the end of 2015.

At the point of losing control from a copyright perspective, the powers that be are seeking to prepare the nation to be exposed to a document that is integral to a series of events leading to one of our greatest tragedies.

In January, Germany’s Institute for Contemporary History will publish a new, heavily annotated version of the Führer’s “My Struggle” autobiography.

“I understand some immediately feel uncomfortable when a book that played such a dramatic role is made available again to the public,” Magnus Brechtken, the institute’s deputy director, told the Washington Post.

“On the other hand, I think that this is also a useful way of communicating historical education and enlightenment — a publication with the appropriate comments, exactly to prevent these traumatic events from ever happening again.”

[snip]

The institute defends the new, 2,000-page reprint, saying it will serve as an important academic tool containing criticisms and analysis. Hitler’s original was 700 pages long.

But not everyone agrees.

“I am absolutely against the publication of ‘Mein Kampf,’ even with annotations. Can you annotate the devil? Can you annotate a person like Hitler?” said Levi Salomon, spokesman for the Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism in Berlin, UPI reported. “This book is outside of human logic.”

Charlotte Knobloch, head of the Jewish Community in Munich, said she didn’t strongly oppose the project at first, but changed her mind after talking to aghast Holocaust survivors.

“This book is most evil; it is a worse anti-Semitic pamphlet and a guidebook for the Holocaust,” she said, UPI reported. “It is a Pandora’s Box that, once opened again, cannot be closed.”

The money quote is this.

“This book is too dangerous for the general public,” library historian Florian Sepp told the newspaper.

This is one of those arguments where you are making a trade-off between emotional sensibility and commitment to Enlightenment ideals.

Survivors of the Holocaust, their descendants, and anyone with an ounce of human sensitivity can understand the horror of this book and the desire to do everything possible to prevent its reintroduction to the public and possible mainstreaming. This is especially so at this time in Europe where the collapse of the old democratic socialist models in the face of demographic decline and economic weakness has led to the resurrection of totalitarian nationalist parties which are rapidly becoming part of the mainstream of politics. For both emotional and pragmatic reasons, you can understand the desire to keep this book under lock and key in a "poison cabinet" as does the Bavarian State Library.

On the other hand, if you believe in Enlightenment ideals and human rights and freedom of speech and personal agency, you have to reject this sympathetic argument in its entirety. Books are not the problem, people's choices are.

It is not only rank elitism to wish to exercise control over what others read, think, and speak of but also the seed of a coercive and repressive set of actions that can grow out of control.

From this perspective, the issue is not whether individuals might be corrupted by the power of the word, but which is the lesser of two evils: individual citizens making their own decisions and potentially making bad decisions, or the concentration of power in the hands of the government to make decisions on behalf of everyone else.

The Enlightenment advocate has to come down on the side of the rights of individuals, knowing that there will be bad actors.

Likewise, to my mind, those sensitive to the feelings of others and concerned about the risks associated with individuals exercising their freedoms and human rights, also have to come down on the side of freedom. Concentrated power will always be abused whereas individuals exercising power will only occasionally abuse it.

Entirely separate from that argument though is a deeper one regarding our conviction about the power of the written word. I am a reader committed to books and the freedom of sharing ideas through reading and speech. Yet I am also an empiricist. What evidence is there that the mere publication of a book will have any measurable effect on either an individual or any defined group of people? That evidence is vanishingly small and that which does exist tends to be febrile.

This, I think, is an interesting issue. We passionately believe as a culture in the power of the word. We also passionately believe as a culture in reason, empiricism and the scientific method. And we are not able to reconcile those two beliefs so we effectively ignore the fact that the one belief does not validate the other at this time.

To be clear, I suspect that books do have long term and material consequences. I am simply acknowledging that currently we can't show that they do nor do we even have a theory as to the causal mechanism for how they exert their influence. Fundamentally, we don't know which books are going to affect which people in what ways. Without knowing that, we have no empirical basis for believing in the capacity of books to systemically affect outcomes.