Branching out

My newest article for Scriptus is a bit of a departure from my usual fashion pieces -but then again, it is about literature, one of my great loves. I hope you enjoy this piece even though it's a change of theme. It's titled "Reasons not to Ban Mein Kampf".

For one of my courses called Literature of Social Exclusion, we’re reading, among other texts, passages from Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf. Our professor, Ernst van den Hemel, pointed out to us that since the book cannot be sold in the Netherlands, we will be reading selections from it on Blackboard. We were a little confused –were we going to read it illegally? He clarified that, although it is legal to be in possession of the book, it is illegal to sell it for profit in the Netherlands. You can read or even order it online in a perfectly legal manner, however. 

This all strikes me as quite contradictory. First of all, if it’s clearly possible to access the book through legal means, what’s the point of banning it? Has this ban become obsolete in the digital age, or is it just meant to be symbolic of our disapproval of the ideology underlying the book? 

Michiel van Eyck, who was prosecuted last year for ‘racial hatred and discrimination’ after putting a copy of Mein Kampf up for sale in his gallery, believes the former, arguing that you can easily access it anyway. “I sell historical objects and I feel that I should be able to sell the book. It’s no use hiding the past away”. He was eventually acquitted. 

The Dutch government owns the rights to Mein Kampf, preventing the book from being published in the Netherlands, and a recent motion to lift the ban narrowly failed to pass –suggesting the reasons for the existence of the ban might be of a more timeless, symbolic nature. 

But where does this leave us in our recently polemical discussion on ‘freedom of speech’? Can we still claim our right to ‘be Charlie’, yet act as if what is no doubt one of the most influential texts in the 20th century was never written? It seems like we want to have our cake and eat it too. 

It also feels deeply ironic that Dutch law is choosing to deal with the Nazi text par excellence in exactly the same way as the Nazis who burned books which were “viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism”, according to our trusty Wikipedia. Just like Nazis censored literature containing liberal, democratic ideas, we are censoring Mein Kampf because we consider it subversive to our own, liberal society. Instead of rising above such practices and accepting the existence of different ideologies, we repress them, acting in eery semblance to what we seek to avoid. 

Out of sight, out of mind –such seems to be the logic behind the ban of Mein Kampf. In our bid to make the nightmare it represents go away, we treat Mein Kampf like dark magic, investing it with the power of our fear. Yet if we trust the law telling us that this book is evil and should not be read, we risk forgetting the reasons it was so bad in the first place. Isn’t it much less likely that this book will give somebody the ‘wrong ideas’ if it is addressed, deconstructed, demystified in our society? 

The only way to avoid making the same mistakes is by learning from them and acknowledging the past, however painful it may be to some. Germany has admirably followed this policy in remembering the atrocities of WWII –and it seems to be continuing in the same line with its plans to republish, for the first time, an annotated edition of Mein Kampf in 2016. Approaching this text from a scientific, historically aware point of view; criticizing, not silencing; remembering, not forgetting: We will not be focusing on pointless attempts to restrict access, but rather on promoting an informed, conscious attitude towards these dark pages in our history. 

 You can check it out in the digital version of Scriptus here -so you can also see the amazing illustration Yin made to go with this piece :)