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MAINTENANCE. In “Translating Hitler”, Olivier Mannoni dissects the mechanisms of totalitarian language and exposes, as closely as possible, the worst that humanity can always produce.
Interview by Peggy Sastre
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Reading time: 10 mins
PFor a time, his name was kept secret for “obvious security reasons”. Olivier Mannoni is however not the type to hide. Biographer of Manès Sperber, translator of Goethe, Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Günter Grass and even Peter Sloterdijk, he is one of our most eminent speakers of German language and culture. Still, in October 2015 he was caught in a whirlwind: Weekly Books has just revealed that the Fayard publishing house has chosen him as translator for the scientific edition of Mein Kampf of Adolf Hitler, and the landerneau got carried away.
In particular, it was a blog post by Jean-Luc Mélenchon that set fire to the proverbial powders. Speaking to Sophie de Closets, her editor the previous year of The Age of the People and now…
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