Mein Kampf touted as flight read

Looking for a good book to read on his long-haul flight back to the United Kingdom, a South African expatriate was shocked to find a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf on the Exclusive Books bookshelves at OR Tambo International Airport.

“If the largest bookseller in the country is openly selling Mein Kampf at the airport, it shows complete disregard, not just for Jews, and it seems happy to flaunt its disregard in front of international travellers,” said the traveller, who sent a photograph of the book on the shelves to the SA Jewish Report.

“Growing up in South Africa, I was able to be free and open as a Jew and now to go into a bookshop that apparently sells blatant antisemitic literature – and not for historical purposes – makes me wonder if that’s the direction the country is heading. Are the powers that be starting to spread that sort of discourse and intent in the country?” he asked.

He found the book in the history section, at eye level on the shelf. Mein Kampf, written in 1925, is Hitler’s autobiographical and political treatise. This Nazi manifesto promotes antisemitism, racist, and fascist ideologies.

Reprinting this book, the ultimate antisemitic manifesto, was banned in Germany after World War II by Bavaria’s regional government, which held the copyright. Seventy years after Hitler’s death the copyright expired. The Munich Institute of Contemporary History republished an annotated version of Mein Kampf to be sold in Germany’s bookstores from 2016. The annotations expose the incoherent nature of Hitler’s writings and critique his ideologies. In Germany, it remains illegal to distribute or republish Hitler’s original version without annotations.

In the late 1980s, Holocaust survivor Dan Yaron campaigned for a translation of Mein Kampf in Hebrew to be published in Israel. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem financed the project after publishing agencies denied Yaron’s request. An abridged version of Mein Kampf is available in Israeli universities and research institutes, according to The Times of Israel. Yaron advocated for the publication to educate the youth about past atrocities to prevent such catastrophes from reoccurring.

In 2002, The Telegraph newspaper reported that Mein Kampf was the sixth bestselling book in the Palestinian Authority territories.

David Saks, representing the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies, said, “Mein Kampf is a historically significant text, and one can justify its sale on that basis. There is an important caveat, however, and that is that whatever edition is sold needs to include some kind of introductory section appropriately contextualising the work, that is explaining its noxious and dangerous nature and what the ideology it propagated ultimately led to. It can then be argued that it fulfils a constructive educational function.

“When it is simply being presented as is, without any such critical analysis, then it’s a problem. It then comes across as legitimising the book by creating the impression that it’s a bona fide, even respectable work of political philosophy that deserves to be taken seriously,” Saks said.

“From what we can see, the version being sold by Exclusive Books includes no such preliminary scholarly overview. Rather, it’s being marketed straight, even including as its publicity teaser a respectful quotation from the book itself along with a full list of its contents. This isn’t acceptable, and we intend to take this up with Exclusive Books,” Saks said.

The SA Jewish Report sent clear questions to Exclusive Books, but received only the following response: “Exclusive Books isn’t a publisher and doesn’t determine which books are published,” said Maria Varfis from Exclusive Books. “We’re a retailer that stocks a wide and diverse range of titles. Our bookstores endeavour to operate as “indies” serving their local communities. Given our business model, Mein Kampf is published by Penguin Random House and perhaps it is best placed to refer some of your questions to.”

However, it wasn’t the publication of the book the SA Jewish Report was questioning, but the sale of it in mainstream bookstores, especially ones to keep travellers occupied on long-haul flights.