German teachers aim to teach ‘Mein Kampf’ in schools to defeat extremism
An annotated version of Hitler’s infamous “Mein Kampf,” banned in Germany for decades, will hit the bookshelves in January. Now it will become part of the school curriculum to “immunize” teenagers against fascist ideas, the German Teachers’ Association says.
On Friday, German
Teachers’ Association and the Social Democrats proposed that Hitler’s
autobiographical Nazi manifesto be taught in high schools to help “immunize” youngsters against far-right ideologies.
“A
professional use of excerpts from the [original] text for lecturing can
be an important tool for immunization of teenagers against political
extremism,” the president of the association, Josef Kraus, told Handelsblatt newspaper, arguing that schools cannot ignore Hitler’s book.
He says “Mein Kampf” is better taught as a revised
edition by professionally trained politics teachers rather than get
accessed by youngsters in the web without any guidance.
Ernst Dieter Rossmann, the Social Democrats’ spokesperson for education, said: “Terrible
and monstrous book like ‘Mein Kampf,’ with its anti-Semitic and
people-hating rants, has to be taught by highly qualified lecturers as
part of the modern school curriculum.”
Rossmann says that German teenagers are facing times of “reawakening right-wing populism,” and therefore propagandizing humanist values and the basics of democracy is becoming increasingly important.
The
teachers’ association proposed that selected passages from the book
should be taught to students aged 16 and over, according to
Handelsblatt.
However, prominent Bavarian Jewish community leader
Charlotte Knobloch told the newspaper that she strongly opposed the
idea, saying that using the “profoundly anti-Jewish diatribe” as teaching material would be irresponsible. “German [high-school] students know nothing about Jews and Jewry but the Holocaust,” she added.
“Mein Kampf”
has not been printed in Germany since the end of the Second World War,
with the government of Bavaria retaining copyright on the book for
decades. In January 2016, the copyright is due to expire under German
law, and a “scholarly annotated” edition of the book is due to
be published. The Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History plans
to publish the edition, entitled: “Hitler, Mein Kampf: A critical edition,” in January, adding some 3,500 references to the Nazi leader’s diatribes.
Many
in Germany believe the book that outlined strategies for establishing
the Nazi regime and genocidal practices to exterminate whole peoples
should not be published in modern times. A recent poll released by YouGov suggested two out of five Germans are concerned that reprinting “Mein Kampf” could facilitate the rise of the far-right in the country.
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