German writer Iris Radisch says will never touch Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”

January 17, 2016 - 0:0

TEHRAN -- German writer Iris Radisch has said that she will never even touch “Mein Kampf” after the reprint of the Nazi leader’s political treatise came out in Germany at the end of 2015.

Radisch, the winner of the Media Award for Language Culture in Germany in 2008, made the remarks during a meeting that Saless Publications held in Tehran on Sunday to promote the Persian version of her book “Camus: Das Ideal der Einfachheit” (“Camus, the Ideal Simplicity”).

Germany published “Mein Kampf” with explanatory sections and some 3,500 annotations. Hitler wrote the book between 1924 and 1926 while in jail for treason.

The Allies banned “Mein Kampf” at the end of World War Two. And now, the re-reprint of the book is facing heavy demand.

“This book has been published 70 years after its first edition and it naturally has made the neo-Nazis feel happy,” Radisch said.

“The book was always being circulated underground among the neo-Nazis and now it is annotated to be of use to scholars and students, but rest assured that I will never even touch the book,” she stated.

In an article published on January 8, the Guardian said that the release of the book got mixed reactions from the Jewish community in Germany.

The president of Germany’s Jewish Council, Josef Schuster, told the broadcaster NDR that he welcomed the publication of the annotated version as it would serve to “undo the myth of this book” and show how “completely wrong and ridiculous Hitler’s theories … were”.

Charlotte Knobloch, leader of the Jewish community in Munich, however, said she could not imagine seeing “Mein Kampf” in shop windows.

Photo: German writer Iris Radisch speaks during a meeting that Saless Publications held in Tehran on January 15, 2016 to promote the Persian version of her book “Camus: Das Ideal der Einfachheit”.

MMS/YAW
END