Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, Volumes 1 & 2

Only Rimini Protokoll, the award-winning documentarists of the European stage, the company that has previously put out-of-work Egyptian muezzins and contemporary Athenian Prometheuses on stage, would dare take on a book as infamous and controversial as “Mein Kampf” (1925–26).

The grimmest bestseller of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler’s two-volume authorial effort—that combination of autobiography and political manifesto which was destined to become the Bible of German National Socialism—is the explosive material Rimini Protokoll bring to the Onassis Stegi two years after “Situation Rooms”, their fascinating live videogame-installation on the arms trade.

But is “Mein Kampf” really such a dangerous read? Is it perilously effective propaganda or might it just be a mishmash of commonplaces and paranoid, second-hand ideologies? What can the symbolic ban on a physical reprint hope to achieve when it is breaking download records on the Internet as an e-book? What is its historical, political and literary value? What has kept the “Mein Kampf” myth alive for the last sixty years? And what does Hitler actually say in it?

These are the questions posed for public debate by this audacious production from the theatre company that has been redefining the documentary theatre genre for fifteen years now. And all this amidst the storm of reactions stirred up by plans to finally reissue “Mein Kampf” in Germany, following the removal of a ban in place since the end of World War Two.

True to the terms of a ‘theatre of reality’, Rimini Protokoll have enlisted a cast of subject specialists rather than professional actors: historians and experts in international law and human rights, a conservator of old manuscripts, a music producer who has been blind since birth, an Israeli lawyer and a Turkish hip-hop / metalcore artist and ethnologist.