oa Hermeneutische confrontaties

Hermeneutical confrontations. The scientific edition of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte

The reissue by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Munich/Berlin) of Mein Kampf caused a short but heated international debate. This new confrontation with Adolf Hitler’s text was a hermeneutical challenge for the publishers, a work in which so many historical layers of meaning, such as the original context or the hagiographical position between 1933 and 1945, were present. A conventional and neutral historical edition was an impossible goal. The scientific edition had to navigate between source criticism, textual criticism, and ideological criticism. The choice was made for a normative hermeneutic in which Hitler’s arguments were contradicted as much as possible, but combined with a profound source and text criticism. This ‘critical edition’ is a great achievement of contemporary historical science in Germany. It can also be seen as the conclusion of a long cycle of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Germany.