Press Coverage
Publicity for mass murderers has its place—as a lesson
(Daily Herald, Big Picture, Local Focus, Apr. 26, 2007 Bert Constable) - The book is a compelling read — but I don’t feel comfortable letting you know that I’m reading it.
In response to the debate about whether the writings, photos and videos left behind by the Virginia Tech slayer offer insight to his madness or merely incite copycats, our editor won’t even let me print the man’s name. So I discreetly tuck this queen mother of mass murder books behind the sports section for fear someone might glimpse the cover and draw the wrong conclusion about me.
“The plain brown paper cover,” suggests museum scholar Peter Black, “as a historian of this period, I completely understand that. I’ve done it all my life.”
OK then. I’ll come clean.
I’m reading The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary— an 880-page Adolf Hitler compilation published in English by Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers in Wauconda (www. bolchazy.com). A digital eBook version of the book comes out today on a searchable compact disc ($399) that includes thousands of pages of unabridged Hitler speeches and proclamations in English and German.
Founded by scholars Lou and Marie Bolchazy in 1979, Bolchazy-Carducci Publishing has built its reputation in ancient Greek and Latin classics. Their catalog includes titles such as , The Story of the Iliad, Vergil’s Aenied or even quirky surprise hits such as Cattus Petasatus and other Dr. Seuss books in Latin.
“We were concerned about how it would be perceived,” general editor Marie Carducci Bolchazy says of the new Hitler offerings.
The red front cover features a black-and-white photo of Hitler that is serious (even “dignified,” Marie Bolchazy says) superimposed over a subtle swastika.
The back cover — a stark photo of well-dressed Germans wading through the rubble of Hamburg in 1943 shows “what he did to his own people,” Bolchazy adds.
While the Bolchazys realize the revulsion of Hitler, their publishing house embraces a written company philosophy of building “a better future by bringing forward the lessons of the past.”
“I realize Hitler is like a germ responsible for the slaughter of 50 or 60 million people,” Lou Bolchazy says. “But I see the need to put this germ under a microscope so that we can learn how to recognize it.”
Banning Hitler’s words and image “give them a mystery and allure they really don’t deserve,” agrees Black, the senior historian at the renowned United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. “This [book] enables people in the general public to judge for themselves the hate speech.”
While the ignorant might delude themselves into thinking “Hitler wasn’t really that bad,” Black says Hitler’s “words stand to contradict that.”
While editing the book, Marie Bolchazy says she saw how Hitler’s earliest speeches hint of the horrors to come.
“The kernels are there,” she says, recalling a younger Hitler’s screeds about people with disabilities. “You realize that he was talking about exterminating them. It just hits you.”
Clearly aimed at an audience more academic and history-minded than your basic neo-Nazi , the paperback ($39.99) is selling well at bookstores, Marie Bolchazy says.
“It’s the general public we are after because who does the voting?” Lou Bolchazy says, suggesting the book can enlighten members of today’s democratic society on the need to prevent another Hitler. “They have to have access if this is going to work.”
|
