A Norwegian publishing firm is reportedly about to release the first new edition of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf in Norwegian since Nazi Germany occupied Norway in 1941. Historians don’t think it’s a good idea.
Newspaper Dagsavisen reported this week that Christhard Hoffmann, a professor of history at the University of Bergen, was asked to write the foreword for the new edition but declined. “As a German, and a historian, I don’t have much desire to promote a book like Mein Kampf in Norway,” Hoffmann told Dagsavisen.
Publisher Arve Juritzen, who recently sold his publishing company, is believed to be behind the new edition, which hasn’t appeared on any lists of upcoming releases yet. Norway’s business registration agency, however, confirms that Juritzen registered a new publishing company called Literarum forlag on March 8.
Juritzen wouldn’t confirm or deny publication of a new Mein Kampf, which may be released next month. Dagsavisen noted that it’s already being debated at Norway’s Holocaust Center in Oslo, which questions why a new edition is necessary. Hoffmann will take part in a public discussion of Mein Kampf on April 27, not least a “critical” edition that was published in Germany in 2016 after rights to the book were relinquished, 70 years after Hitler’s suicide in 1945.
Norway’s Jewish Museum in Oslo also questions the need for a new version of Hitler’s manifest. “I can’t see any point in a new Norwegian edition of Mein Kampf,” historian Kjetil Braut Simonsen at the Jødisk Museum told Dagsavisen, noting that earlier editions with Hitler’s “hateful content, anti-semitic conspiracy notions and racial ideology” remain available.
newsinenglish.no staff
