April 23, 2009
In News
By Hanna Ingber Win
Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf has become a popular book among students in India looking for tips on management tactics, reports the Daily Telegraph. Students striving to become successful businessmen and women are using the Nazi leader’s infamous autobiography as a self-help book.
Sales of the book over the last six months topped 10,000 in New Delhi alone, according to leading stores, who said it appeared to be becoming more popular with every year.
…
Students are increasingly coming in asking for it and we’re happy to sell it to them,” said Sohin Lakhani, owner of Mumbai-based Embassy books who reprints Mein Kampf every quarter and shrugs off any moral issues in publishing the book.
Management Today questions the effectiveness of Mein Kampf as a management self-help guide.
Even if you can stomach the vitriol, paranoia, militarism and crude racism, the book is so long and tedious that even Hitler’s ally Mussolini didn’t manage to plough his way through it, once apparently dismissing it as ‘a boring tome that I never been able to read’ (Churchill concurred, calling it ‘turgid, verbose [and] shapeless’). So its credentials as a management text seem rather dubious.
The Telegraph reports that Mein Kampf has also been popular in Croatia, Russia and Turkey. While in Germany, its publication is banned until 2015. It is not banned in the United States.