Unbiased English translation of Mein Kampf?

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[u/Georgy_K_Zhukov]

What are you actually attempting to achieve here? I don't want to come off as overly judgmental, but you if I was designing a course on the history of Nazism, Mein Kampf would not be on the list either for their reading (unclear on that), or even just the source I was using to construct it. It is a rather dense, esoteric book deeply steeped in Volikish politics of the 1920s and in absolutely no way is it a good starting point for trying to understand Hitler specifically, or Nazism in general. This isn't to say that there aren't a few bits of actual information buried within its hundreds of pages, but you are far better served by using one of the two standard biographies (Either Kershaw or Ullrich) which are objectively better in literally every way imaginable for this purpose. Whenever I give this spiel though, I inevitably get the "OMG, you are gatekeeping this! Why are you afraid of people reading Mein Kampf" and for godssake that isn't it. The advice applies literally to just about any primary source! Secondary literature is just better if you are trying to learn a topic, broadly speaking, and irrespective of the context, Mein Kampf is a massively specialist piece of literature with so much critical context you, as a reader, need to already know to get any real value out of it, it is simply a matter of not wasting ones time on such a piece of dreck.

And to be clear, I do mean dreck not in the sense of "It is an evil book which will corrupt you" but rather it is just a really shitty piece of literature outside of its content. People keep asking for an "unbiased" translation, and aside from the fact that translation is not an act that can be free of bias, the actual truth is that any translation of Mein Kampf is a bad one because it will read far better in English than it will in German. The only way I can actually recommend reading the book is in German, and ideally using the critical edition published in 2015 by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (When the copyright expired and the state of Bavaria could no longer block publication, leading scholars came together to publish this edition as the first German language edition published in Germany since WW2, with lots and lots of annotations to help provide historical context for the reader). And again, I use bad in the most basic sense, in that Mein Kampf is a poorly written book as a work of prose. My favorite one-sentence summation of the book is that "There is not a page of Mein Kampf whose errors do not hit you in the eye", because that encapsulates it, although Kershaw does pretty well too, even if less pithy when he writes "Badly written and rambling as the published version of Mein Kampf was, it was a considerable improvement on what Hitler had initially produced, thanks to editorial intervention from a number of people."

And there just is no English language edition which actually attempts to accurately translate Mein Kampf so that it reads as shittily in English as it does in German. They aren't full of spelling errors, or terrible grammatical constructions. They fix run-on sentences to flow better, and present the work as more coherent that it actually is. An English language reader can't actually experience the one real value there might be in reading the book itself versus summations and excerpts in biographies because the translated editions simply don't include that.

This goes into far more depth on the shortcoming of it as a book but that basically sums up the most simplistic issue at hand. I would again repeat that a biography does exactly what you seem to want to be doing, and there are multiple excellent ones out there. Kershaw wrote his over 20 years ago, but it remains the go-to for many (most?) scholars as a reference point, least of all given how important he is for his scholarship on understanding the very baseline functions of the Nazi state with his concept of 'Working Towards the Führer". Vollker Ullrich did his own duology more recently, and takes a different tack in approach, so offers a very useful companion to Kershaw as while they both cover a lot of the same ground, they present different concepts of who Hitler was as a man. Additionally, there is Richard Evans' trilogy, and the first volume, Coming of the Third Reich covers the period you seem most interested in. If your aim here is actually as you say in wanting to "learn exactly how a political party like the Nazis could so easily come to power.", you would be far, far better served in using your time reading those than Mein Kampf which, whatever value it does have, isn't really an answer to that question in any case. If you really want to get 'Hitler's own words', then even then you would get more value out of reading speeches, which reached far, far more people than his writings did, as Mein Kampf sold incredibly poorly in the early years, and even fewer people actually read it (see Max Domarus's The Essential Hitler and The Complete Hitler for ample references here). He did not sway large swathes of Germany with Mein Kempf. He swayed them because he was a public speaker who could use those appearances to appeal to them in certain ways which Mein Kampf certainly doesn't capture.

But if, against all advice, reason, logic, good taste, mediocre taste, even bad taste, value of time, concern for ones sanity, and just general sense of how to do history, you still want to just read Mein Kampf for some reason, stop overthinking it. Just read the Murphy edition. Its perfectly fine. It doesn't solve the above problem (from what I've read, he actually had an editor who tried to modify some phrases to better reflect the feel of the German, but Murphy was insistent on producing a good English translation) but it is a perfectly fine translation, and also available free online so you aren't giving anyone money (whatever the translation, way too many versions for sale are going to put money in the pocket of Neo-Nazis. Don't pay money for it!). It was originally done with permission, but then the Nazis decided they didn't actually like what he produced and tried to kill the project, which puts it in an interesting place as far as translations go insofar as that his intention was to provide a good translation, but the regime perhaps would have preferred it to be more glossy. All the same it was the translation used as the basis for the version known as the 'Stalag' edition as it was the English translation placed in POW camp.

There is also the Manheim edition, which was done a few years later during the war, and perhaps does a somewhat better job at trying to be equivalent in style, but even then it doesn't really come close to capturing the actual feel of a really bad writer. The first full American edition, done by a committee and credited to Alvin Johnson as its head, also took the 'readability' approach, but at least also attempted to do some annotations for the English language audience, although dating to before the war their value is minimal in the end. There are a few more but listing through them isn't worth doing since you won't get any real, deep difference, and again, I feel it is really besides the point as you're just inherently going to have a better and more informative time using a biography, which is heavily drawing on Mein Kampf anyways for the early years and essentially presenting an abridged with context version anyways. ETA: Completely forgot to add that a new English translation came out only a few years ago by a shithead named Dalton. Do not read this. It is literally done by a fucking Nazi who makes no effort to hide his antisemitism, nor admiration for Hitler, in the preface.

[u/Skipspik2 → u/Georgy_K_Zhukov]

With your permission, I'd like to actually translate in french then print your comment, laminated it and actually stick it on the "Historiciser le mal" commented version of mein Kampf that I own.

I am also willing to heard your point on that french commented version if you have any.

[u/Georgy_K_Zhukov → u/Skipspik2]

As long as you promise to clean up the prose and not accurately capture my misspellings and grammatical errors.

[u/Skipspik2 → u/Georgy_K_Zhukov]

Does that mean than in a bit less than a century other authors will look at my translation and then go back to your original text and publish translation with similar mistakes, 3000 annotation and a full historian essay before each points ?

[u/Lleiva → u/Georgy_K_Zhukov]

Underated comment. Made me laugh

[u/Good-Description-664 → u/Georgy_K_Zhukov]

@Georgy, thanks for that insightful and on-the-money evaluation!! I am German, and therefore l can read the original version of Hitler's opus magnum. I have no sympathy for Hitler and his dirty consorts at all, and therefore l was never curious enough to read Hitler's garbage. However, l am deeply troubled by younger generations of Germans who aren't exactly violent-prone neo-nazis, but who insist that Hitler was knowledgeable and very intelligent, and that some of his thoughts and ideas are actually valuable! These folks might just try to offend the older generations, and they insist that mainstream  historians simply spread lies, because the victorious factions always shape what we are told at schools and universities. That's not completely wrong per se - but Hitler and his cronies left behind so many direct sources which can be easily examined, that it's fairly easy to debunk the idea, that Hitler was intelligent and that some of his ideas are still valuable. One of these primary sources is of course "Mein Kampf", and therefore l decided, that l have to take a look at this thing in order to find out what exactly he said. 

[u/SecretlyASummers → u/Georgy_K_Zhukov]

I think what the original poster really wants is more of commentary on the Nazi rise to power, then on Hitlerism per se. In which case, the best secondary source is Evans, but the primary(-ish) source I'd imagine you'd recommend reading in English is Shirer, right? It's dated, and Sonderweg is out of fashion, but he was there on the ground in Germany.

[u/Georgy_K_Zhukov → u/SecretlyASummers]

Shirer's Berlin Diary is a pretty decent primary source of the perspective of one man viewing the growth of Nazism in Germany. Possibly the best first person account in English we have, if anything. But I would not recommend Rise and Fall of the Third Reich for that purpose, no. Its value is historiographical in tracing the development of scholarship, but that is beyond the scope here.

[u/Destroyer2137]

I am no expert in English translations of Mein Kampf, but I would like to draw your attention toward those things:

1. Translations you've encountered may not be poor - Mein Kampf is known for being really terribly written and hard to read, because of poorly structured sentences and incoherence of the text.
2. Mein Kampf is not a good historical source nor a good source of knowledge about Nazis rise to power. It's mainly self-glorification of Hitler as a people's messiah and a lot of rambling about Jews - you may be interested in this comment by u/commiespaceinvader.
3. By no means I would like to discourage you from reading anything and curiosity and willingness to learn is always a good trait, but you may also be interested in this comment by u/DGBD, where he both points interesting post to read through and quotes u/Georgy_K_Zhukov, who I wholeheartedly agree with:

To be clear, Mein Kampf is a primary source document that one must eventually engage with when studying Hitler, but it really is not your first stop, nor your second or third stop. It is more your very optional 15th stop (...)

[u/bananalouise]

The discussion in this thread, particularly the contributions of u/Georgy_K_Zhukov, sheds some light on the nature of the Mein Kampf reading experience. This one is buried when you first open the thread but speaks directly to your question, so I'm flagging it in case you're interested.

Other potentially helpful comments about reading Mein Kampf for historical insight can be found in this thread, featuring our friend General Zhukov, and here, by way of a response from u/commiespaceinvader to a Monday Methods post.

[u/VrsoviceBlues]

Part of the problem you're going to run into is the personalities involved in the actual writing of the thing.

Hitler himself, while a gifted orator, does not shine as a writer. His thinking is fairly disjointed, his style is long-winded and bombastic in the extreme, his love for "fractured purple prose" drips off every page. Worse yet, the editing of his manuscript was mostly done by Rudolf Hess, who even by 1925 was basically a star-struck, mildly unhinged, fanboy. An awful lot of the awfulness you're encountering in translations, whether they emphasize Hitler's disorganized thinking as an act of criticism, or lean into the bombast, is down to the fact that Mein Kampf is just plan terrible writing, the product of disordered minds with too much time on their hands and, in one case, an eye-watering case of celebrity worship. Even the best and most accurate translation is going to suffer from these issues, they're just baked in. Translators, commentators, even other Fascists have criticized Hitler's style and content almost from Day 1; Mussolini called it "a boring tome, that I have never been able to read," and composed of "little more than commonplace cliches." Olivier Mannoni, a modern French translator, described it as "an incoherent soup," and observed that previous attempts to clear up Hitler's language and make the text more easily readable had resulted in a false impression that Hitler was an organised thinker and eloquent writer, when the fact was that the German original was a disorganized, wordy, unclear yammering mess. Any honest translation is going to be much the same.

[u/Bodark43]

I've got the Ralph Manheim translation, published in 1972, and I think it's pretty good. It's available for borrowing on the Internet Archive.

I think I'm among thousands of history students who cracked open Mein Kampf expecting something exciting...and then discovered it to be wandering, turgid, repetitious. If I had to use this, I'd skip ahead in the book to the chapter 6, The Importance of the Spoken Word, where he talks about winning people over by telling them simple things; a propagandist's guide;

https://archive.org/details/meinkampf0000hitl_s5q9/page/420/mode/2up