The Hitler dollar

Have you ever read Mein Kampf? I did. At school. Okay, I didn’t finish it but I did take it out the library. How bizarre is that? It was readily available in my school library. There on the shelf in the Non-Fiction section. Yes, in the Non-Fiction section. Makes you wonder about that word.

But that’s not why I’m writing this piece. There is another question that intrigues me more than the fact that a school would have a copy. Mein Kampf is still being sold today. You’ll find it on both Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com. Which means someone out there is making money on it. Turning a profit on Adolf Hitler’s words. Imagine that.

Man 1: So how do you make your money?
Man 2: I make it from Nazism, how ’bout you?

So who are they? These people making their cash from selling Mein Kampf to the fascists, the history geeks and the odd Durban high school. Hitler, of course, was the first person to make money on it. It made him a millionaire. Let him buy his first Mercedes before he was even out of prison. But what about today? Who’s cashing in now?

These guys are: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And they are not some crazy Nazi outfit, some underground white power group, they are a very respectable publishing house in Boston. Established in 1832, they’ve published some of the greats: Philip Roth, JRR Tolkien, Günter Grass and the Fuhrer. I wanted to know more so I wrote to them.

From David Smith
To [email protected]
Date Tue, June 16, 2009 at 12:35 AM
Subject The profits from Mein Kampf

So it is 13 minutes after midnight and I’m trying to write this article. Until about 5 minutes ago I had no idea what I was going to write about, but then I hit on an interesting idea. Mein Kampf. Someone is selling it. Therefore someone is making money from it.

And I found your name on the internet.

I was wondering if you could tell me how many copies you sell, how much money you make from the book, and what you do with it? Is it treated separately from your other earnings or does it all just go into the same pot? I don’t ask these questions because I want to be militant or anything. Just strikes me as an interesting line of thought. Who’s turning a dime on Hitler’s rhymes?

That last line was meant for effect, I know it isn’t a poem. Anyway, if you can help, please do.

Your humble servant
David J Smith

I received a short note from them saying the question had been referred to their PR department but I haven’t heard anything since. I can understand why. This is an awkward subject. And my email was fairly flippant.

But here are some of the facts via Google. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has a long history with the book. They were the publishers before WWII and then reacquired the rights in 1979. It retails on Barnesandnoble.com for $17.60 or $15.84 if you’re a member. Go the Barnes and Noble card! And approximately 15 000 copies are sold every year in the United States alone.

Now, questioning a person’s right to publish a book is one of those loaded issues. It is an attack on freedom of speech. It can raise the hackles on even the most sedate liberal’s back. And it is not something I wish to do. In my opinion, all books (even the evil ones) are a good thing. They are the marker stones of the human journey, plotting a higgledy-piggledy course through history. They show us where we have been, where we got lost, where the good spots are and where the bad spots are. They record the mountains we have climbed and the quagmires where we have floundered. To remove a book is to remove part of that journey, it is to censor the human story. And we need to be able to say “Yup, we’ve done that, didn’t go so well, in fact, it went really awful. And that’s why we have it marked on the map in big red letters”.

So what is my problem?

My problem lies in making a profit from this book. The fact that back in 1979, the rights to this book came up for sale and someone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt looked at it and thought “We can make some money. We did it back in the 30s. We can do it again”. I can forgive them for the 1930s, back then, people were still not totally aware of the Fuhrer’s master plan. But in 1979, they went into this thing with open eyes. They looked at this book and saw all the nice things that profits can buy. Cars, houses, fancy restaurants, private school fees and holidays abroad. Now, I realise these publishers aren’t selling that many copies (only 15 000 annually) so the point may seem moot. You won’t be sending your kids to Harrow on that. But what if they did start selling more? What if world opinion started to swing distinctly right, as it seems to have done in the European parliamentary election, and copies started flying out the door? What then?

Well, that is exactly what happened in Turkey in 2005. The Iraq war, the Israel-Palestine conflict and a rise in Turkish nationalism fuelled the flames of anti-Semitism. The result: The sales of Mein Kampf rocketed. Right into the top-10 list. Over a 100 000 copies were sold. Naturally, local Jewish leaders were alarmed and protested the book’s sale. But the booksellers and the local publishers assured the Jewish leaders that their motives were “purely commercial and not ideological”. … Hold on, let’s rewind on that! … Purely commercial? What kind of answer is that? Kristallnacht, the final solution, the gas chambers, those little yellow stars, the Holocaust, yes, we understand your concern, but don’t worry we are only in it for the money. When did publishers become mercenaries? I could understand if they were mad-for-it Nazis or crazy skinheads, but just doing it for the money, that’s some kind of evil. That’s what I expect from a person like Victor Bout, the Russian arms dealer. A dude who put AK47s in the hands of child soldiers, all in the name of the almighty dollar. I didn’t expect it from a publisher.

The popularity of the book is not isolated to Turkey. Today in India, sales of the book are increasing. Bizarrely, Indian business students see Hitler as a bit of a management guru. And yet again the offending publishers and booksellers have used the “dollar defence” against any questions of morality. “We are just making money,” come the cries. Whatever happened to that romantic image we have of book people? Funny old men in tweed jackets with tea stains on their ties. It seems they have all put on jackboots and begun marching to a new song: Profit über alles!

Some people will struggle to agree with me. Their belief in freedom of speech and the right to publish will override any issue of vulture commercialism. So let me give you (and them) another example. Think about your local corner shop. Think about the guy who sits behind the counter. You go in there to get some milk. He’s got this bunch of flags for sale behind the counter. Big red ones with swastikas on them. A sign written in kokie pen says: NAZI FLAGS! ONLY R17.60. You ask what this is all about. The answer comes: …”Ja, No, that stuff that happened at Auschwitz wasn’t so lekker. But a oke has to make a living”… You would be like “WTF? Yes, a oke does have to make a living. But off the back of the largest hate crime ever committed in the history of humanity? Are you nuts? You’re cashing in on all those mentalists out there who are looking for a cause. You’re taking their money and offering them a symbol for their hate!” You get where I am going here. That logic doesn’t just apply to the hypothetical flag but to our book too. When you are making money off Nazi tat, you might as well be working the door at the Nuremburg rally taking the ticket money.

So where does this leave us? As my American friends like to say: What’s the win here? It’s simple. This book should not be for sale. It should not be a commercially viable product. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the booksellers in Turkey, the Indians, Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, none of them should be cashing in on it. Now, I’m not suggesting a wholesale burning of books, Fahrenheit 451 style. Nor do I think this book should be banned. It just shouldn’t be for sale. If people want it, put it up on Project Gutenberg or on Google Books, but don’t sell it. People can argue that the world of publishing is going through some bleak times. Sales are down. And profits are at an all-time low. They can even say that publishers need all the money they can get if the industry is going to survive. But the one thing I know is: They don’t need it that bad that they should be turning a dime on Hitler’s rhymes.