It sounds counter-intuitive. German Jews want Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf — the 1925 book that spells out his plan for a Nazi state and gives expression to his extreme anti-Semitism — to be published in Germany. The Central Council of Jews in Germany would be ready to help edit the new edition and pressure the Bavarian state government (which owns the rights and blocks publication) to issue it. As our Berlin correspondent Dave Graham reported, Stephan Kramer, the Central Council ’s general secretary, made the suggestion in an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio (here are the DLF text report and audio in German).

Kramer said things had changed since Bavaria banned its publication in the initial post-war years as a way to thwart a revival of Nazi ideology. “Through the Internet and other media, the book is widely available abroad. Especially in far-right wing circles, there has been what you might call a romanticising of the book Mein Kampf, so I personally and we in the Central Council now feel a publicly available version of Mein Kampf with critical commentaries would now be much more helpful. It would make clear to readers who access it what crude stuff was written there,” he said.

Meanwhile in Austria, work has begun on a spoof biopic of Hitler called — what else? — “Mein Kampf.” It’s based on a play of the same name by the late Hungarian-Jewish playwright George Tabori and will premiere in Germany next year.

How to deal with the Hitler legacy is a political, moral and artistic minefield. The debate about publishing Mein Kampf  has gone on for years. German and Austrian directors have made films about him, but usually serious ones like Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film “Der Untergang “(Downfall). A German parody, “Mein Fuehrer — The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler,” sparked controversy and scathing reviews in Germany last year.

Hitler was responsible for some of the worst evils in history, starting with the Holocaust. Do you think Mein Kampf should be published in Germany or that filmmakers should make parodies of his life?

The southern German state of Bavaria is one of those areas, like southern Poland, that are known for their fervent folk Catholicism. It was on full display last year when Bavaria’s favourite son, Pope Benedict, visited his native state. But Catholicism is changing even in Bavaria, as his successor as archbishop of Munich and Freising has admitted. Cardinal Friedrich Wetter told fellow Bavarian bishops on Thursday that so many candidates for the priesthood have such insufficient knowledge of Catholic teaching that seminaries will have to introduce remedial courses to bring them up to standard.

“Candidates for the priesthood increasingly come from various backgrounds and apply for the admission to the seminary with sometimes quite different prior experiences of faith and the Church,” he said in a statement (here in German). “With a propaedeutic course inserted before normal theology studies in the seminary, the Bavarian bishops want to add an educational phase that fosters the seminarians’ spiritual growth and personal discernment, … transmits basic theological knowledge and allows insight into the real situation of the Church through participation in social and pastoral work.”

A further translation of that translation would be: “we need a remedial course because the incoming seminarians don’t know enough about the Catholic Church.”

The one-year course will start in the fall of 2008 and all entering seminarians will have to take it at the Catholic theology faculties in Passau or Bamberg, Wetter said. He added that the bishops hoped this would not lengthen the overall length of study required before ordination.

According to a Bavarian newspaper, the Augsburger Allgemeine, “professors at the universities often complain about their students’ sketchy knowledge. Professors don’t want to teach catechism, they want to give theology lectures. Even Christian Hartl, regent of the Augsburg seminary, told this newspaper about students who before entering the seminary ‘were not so rooted in their parish’ and had ‘more distance to the faith’ than their predecessors just a few years ago.”

Several other dioceses in Germany have introduced remedial courses at their seminaries in recent years. Neighbouring Austria launched one for all entering seminarians in 2000, after the Vatican advised it following an inspection visit there.