It weighs around 3.5 kilos, totals 864 pages, almost two thirds of which are dedicated to critical analysis, is destined to serve as a work of academic reference and can only be bought by order; Historiciser le mal - Une édition critique de Mein Kampf (“Historicizing Evil, a critical edition of Mein Kampf”) was published in France last month by Paris-based publishing house Fayard.
Its principal co-authors are French historian Florent Brayard and his German colleague Andreas Wirsching, two academics specialised in the history of Nazism. It contains the two separate volumes of Mein Kampf, written by Adolf Hitler between 1924 and 1925, eight years before he took power and established the Third Reich, opening with autobiographical accounts and then leading to his political manifesto.
This revised translation is joined by long introductions to each chapter from a team of historians, with abundant annotations throughout that analyse and contextualise the original ranting text, and highlight the lies it contains.
It is not placed on display in bookshops and can only be bought from them, priced 100 euros, by placing an order. A warning about the contents of the original text appears on every page that can be consulted online on platforms like Amazon.
All the eventual profits from sales of the book are to be given to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation in Poland.
The project to produce ‘Historicizing Evil’ was first announced by Fayard in 2011. The idea of publishing a new French edition of what was the ideological matrix of Nazi crimes initially prompted controversy, raising questions about the morality of re-releasing such a nauseas text, and doubts that it was simply a commercial stunt. Would it, some asked, overshadow the work of historians who for decades have argued that the extent of Nazi crimes was not explained by the manifesto of Hitler alone?
In January 2016 in Germany, after the copyright to Mein Kampf had expired, a new edition was published containing abundant expert analysis, in a project by the Munich-based Institute of Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte) led by Andreas Wirsching. He and French historian Florent Brayard subsequently coordinated the project hatched by Fayard, adapting and expanding the research of the German publication by bringing together historians, linguists, Germanists and other experts. They worked alongside established German-to-French translator Olivier Mannoni (who has previously translated several factual German books on the history of Nazism) as he grappled with the task of translating Hitler’s text in its exact ill-written original form.
In this interview below with Santiago Artozqui from the literary review En Attendant Nadeau, an editorial partner of Mediapart, Mannoni discusses the challenges, doubts and exhaustion he experienced during the many years of completing the translation, and how the rigour of the historians gave a “solidity” and “reassuring stability” to his work.
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EN ATTENDANT NADEAU: Working on this text, which is now almost a century old, you came across a few lexical and linguistic challenges. Was Hitler’s language ‘normal’ for its time or did you have to take into account his specificities and restore a divergence from the norm in this translation?
Olivier Mannoni: Hitler’s language is quite odd. It is firstly that of an autodidact, who didn’t go very far with his studies but who composed a sort of indigent intellectual baggage. One guesses that he tries to imitate the style of the Bildungsroman for all the autobiographical part, for example when he writes: “When, after the death of my mother, I left for the third time for Vienna, and this time for many years, the times that passed gave me back calm and determination.” He draws that from classical and popular literature.
The second style is that of the epic. He no doubt found that in the popular novels of the time; he had perhaps a vague Wagnerian inspiration – he never stops citing the operas of the ‘master of Bayreuth’ – which would become his musical and cultural reference. Siegfried is mentioned several times in his narrative, one comes across three in just the first volume. It can take on, like at the end of this, quite lyrical forms, when Hitler ends the biographical part of the book and the account of the Nazi movement with these hymning sentences: “A fire was lit, from its embers will necessarily one day emerge the sword that must reconquer freedom for the Germanic Siegfried and life. For the German nation. And, alongside the recovery to come, I felt the goddess of the inexorable vengeance begin to move against the act of betrayal of November 9th 2018. That was how the hall slowly emptied. The movement was on the march.” It was a sort of hotchpotch, notably grammatical. In this example can be noted the absurdities in the use of tenses which, like the rest, we rigorously respected.
The second volume is more theoretical. Here, there are glaring intellectual influences. To begin with, the religious texts. The Bible is very frequently cited, directly or in the form of allusions, notably in support of anti-Semitic remarks, with God sort of having to evacuate his elected people to please the Germans. He also cites older German theological texts; I found archaisms which appear to be drawn from 17th-century religious texts. Also present are the texts of völkisch writers, this racist, nationalist and esoteric movement that had already haunted Germany for several decades. It is the language of the myth, of an eternal Germany, a sort of unpalatable mythological and racist hubbub.
He also draws on ‘proper’ authors; Gobineau, for example, concerning racial theories. From Schopenhauer also, which is above all for the style, which he clumsily attempts to imitate. And from Nietzsche, for the pseudo-philosophical outbursts. But he had not understood much from these authors, and the result is fairly pitiful. It should be underlined that the team brought together around Florent Brayard carried out fabulous work to identify these influences, which are indicated in the form of notes all the way through the work.
EAN: You worked with historians who add their commentaries to Mein Kampf. Were there moments when, in the reproduction of the text or some of its aspects, the demands of the translator entered into in conflict with those of the historian? If so, where – and how did you settle the differences?
O.M.: I worked in two stages. The first, working alone, lasted two years. Meetings were planned with the team of historians who were to supervise the project. We had only one, and I believed, a few months after sending back my text, that the project was going to be definitively shelved. My first translation met the requirements of a modern translation; loyal to the text in both its form and substance, as precise as possible on a historical level but accessible for a French reader.
In 2016 I had a first contact with Sophie Hogg, publishing editor for historical works at [publishing house] Fayard, and with Florent Brayard, who had just accepted to lead the work. He is a well-respected historian who I knew of notably for his remarkable work on Auschwitz [editor’s note, 'Auschwitz, enquête sur un complot nazi', published in France by Seuil, 2012 ]. He right away proposed to demolish all my work; he didn’t want a translation according to the rule book, he wanted a transposition of Hitler’s text, a text as overloaded, as ‘twisted’, in every sense of the word, as badly written and as badly thought out – I mean by that containing an equally chaotic logical structure – as the original.
I knew straight away that I should refuse. To demolish two years of work, to smash up hundreds of hours looking for the right balance, and to dedicate hundreds of others to bring up another, which would necessarily be shaky, was an absurdity. And yet I accepted without hesitating for one second. What Florent Brayard asked me for was crystal-clear, obvious. I was going to present Hitler’s prose exactly as it was. I had a sense of foreboding of what awaited me, and yet I immediately got to work.
Florent Brayard, backed by Sophie Hogg and actively supported by Fayard CEO Sophie de Closets, put together a team of historians who were going to oversee the project and who, they also, most certainly had doubts about what was waiting for them. Christian Ingrao, Nicolas Patin, David Gallo, Stephan Maertens and many others were the first pillars – some were members of the very first team. Soon joined by other researchers, historians, linguists, Germanists, and so on, they began their job of guiding the work while I began mine on the text.
After a couple of months, the first shuttling took place between the teams created by Florent Brayard and myself. My translation was submitted to a team which dissected my work, adapted it to the requirements put in place for the book, notably regarding homogeneity of the vocabulary, even if that meant having in the French text the numerous repetitions of the German text. I would re-read the proposals, and approve or amend them. We had discussions on the sense of sentences, often incomprehensible, and about technical terms. For example, in what measure was the idea of a fixed translation compatible with the evolution of Hitler’s language as the pages unfurl? Everything took place through discussion and consensus, in a profound respect for our ways of working and our specific disciplines. I must say that I hadn’t imagined that the work would be at the same time so exhausting and so gratifying.
EAN: When one knows to what degree the work of translation consists of appropriating a text, one can imagine the psychological impact that a nine-year immersion into that of Hitler might represent. Is there for you a ‘before’ and ‘after’ regarding this translation. What have been the effects of this work, perhaps felt over time given that, fortunately, you had other parallel projects?
O.M.: I very fortunately translated numerous texts over these eight years, and even if some were linked to Nazism, I also translated many novels and philosophical texts which brought me back into elegance of style and clarity of thought. What must be properly understood is that to translate Mein Kampf means having to carry two weights. Firstly, there’s the burden of the text itself, a text that is sticky in form and vile in substance, a deceitful, paranoiac and violent text and all the more unpleasant to handle given we know what it led to. After that, there is the responsibility that one takes on by carrying out such a work. My solitary work during the first two years frightened me. One cannot take on alone the task of re-emerging a text like that in a new language. The five or six years spent with the team gave me a framework, a stability. And I am proud to have carried out this work with them. The rigour of the historians gave a solidity to my own work, a stability which reassured me.
From the pure point of view of the translation, it involved a sort of experimentation. I had to rip up a good number of rules that I applied to myself over 30 or 40 years in the profession; to accept repetitions, the overloading of adverbs and adjectives, the wobbly sentences, the clumsy rhythm – and to put aside these transgressions when, at the same time, I was working on a separate text which was elegant, reflexive, logical and brilliant. I could never dedicate a lot of time to Mein Kampf in the same day. At the end of one or two hours, one can feel one’s brain becoming bogged down, losing itself in the maze of this perverse thinking.
As for the rest, my only concern is to not become paranoid. There’s not only all of Nazism in Mein Kampf. There are also the seeds – there are elsewhere of course, but all the same – of contemporary far-right thought, and not just that. The ‘great replacement’ is found in chapter 11 of the first book. Obviously, here the ‘great replacement’ is not about ‘Muslims’ but ‘Jews’. The terror felt towards the other and the hate he arouses is echoed in the xenophobic waves that shake our democracies. Sickly hygienism resonates in the phrases of the French far-right about the “sidéens” [a person with AIDS] or “bacterial immigration”.
The type of argument, the style of the demonstrations, represent a good prefiguration of what are the current arguments of confusionism and conspiracy theories, with their accumulation of unverifiable events which lead to imbecilic claims.
In short, one lives with a phantom text and one realises that it’s not dead. It is this link that every translator has with the ghost of their author, alive or dead. Here, it is a spectre, and even if I forbid him to haunt me, I have great difficulty to avoid seeing him shaking his chains in the Europe of the 21st century.
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- Historiciser le mal - Une édition critique de Mein Kampf, published in French by Les éditions Fayard, is available to order, priced 100 euros.
Santiago Artozqui is a regular contributor to the independent online literary review En attendant Nadeau and this article is published in the framework of an editorial partnership with Mediapart. The subject of translation is explored in a series of articles in a dedicated section of En attendant Nadeau, which can be found here.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse