Free Thinking - Mein Kampf; Larissa MacFarquhar; Julia Margaret Cameron
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 7 December 2015
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Anne McElvoy discusses Mein Kampf coming out of copyright with Ben Barkow of the Wiener Library in London, Heinrich von Berenberg – a publisher based in Berlin and Nicholas Stargardt, author of The German War and a professor of Modern European History at Oxford.
Photographer Anna Fox and painter Chantal Joffe discuss an exhibition of Julia Margaret Cameron photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
New Yorker journalist Larissa MacFarquhar talks to Anne McElvoy about altruism.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.3 | Hello, on tonight's show, Hitler's notorious memoir, Mank Mein Kampf, emerges from its copyright later this month. |
| 0:40.0 | How will that affect the afterlife of one of the world's most damaging books? |
| 0:44.9 | I'll also be inviting you to pour over the pictures of the great Victorian photographer, |
| 0:49.8 | Julia Margaret Cameron, at both London's V&A and at the Science Museum, marking the bicentenary of her birth. |
| 0:57.0 | And with Christmas not far away, what do we really make of full-on altruism? |
| 1:02.4 | I got very intrigued by this collection of ideas that feed into the pejorative term do-gooder. |
| 1:08.5 | A lot of the origin comes from psychoanalysis, which has been for much of its |
| 1:14.6 | history quite, quite suspicious and hostile towards extremely moral lives. Freud thought that |
| 1:21.1 | someone who was very ethical might suffer from moral masochism, and Anna Freud, his daughter, |
| 1:27.2 | was even more hostile. She thought |
| 1:28.6 | that it denoted a kind of perversion, that it was the result of someone who could only achieve |
| 1:34.3 | gratification through a proxy, through making someone else feel happy. Larissa McFaacroha, |
| 1:39.6 | talking to me about do-gooders, the subject of her first book, Strangers Drowning, Voyages to the Brink of Moral Extremity. |
| 1:47.8 | There'll be more from Larissa later on our mixed feelings about the truly generous. |
| 1:52.9 | But we start with another type of moral extremity. |
| 1:55.9 | Mein Kampf was the document that provided an early route plan for Adolf Hitler's National Socialism. |
| 2:02.9 | And it is, at least for the next 12 days, one of only two books banned from public sale or display in Germany. |
| 2:09.7 | On December the 15th, the copyright expires and with it the ban. |
| 2:14.4 | A new critical edition is to be published by Germany's Institute for Contemporary |
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