‘Turn something negative into something positive’: Hitler’s Mein Kampf transformed into cookbook by Austrian artist
- Austrian artist Andreas Joska-Sutanto has spent the past eight years painstakingly cutting up pages of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, letter by letter
- He then creates new words and sentences out of them, fashioning them into recipes for dishes such as pizza, and asparagus salad
Long reviled as a manifesto of hate, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf has become the raw ingredient for an art project reconstituting the toxic text into something more savoury: a cookbook.
In a cafe in the late Nazi leader’s native Austria, an artist is cutting up the book that laid the ideological foundations for Nazism – its name translates to My Struggle – letter by letter and re-forming them into recipes.
The sentences are mashed and re-served as instructions for making such dishes as pizza, asparagus salad, tiramisu and egg dumplings – said to have been Hitler’s favourite dish.
Artist Andreas Joska-Sutanto has been working at it for eight years and has so far finished cutting up about a quarter of the book after almost 900 hours of painstaking work.
“I want to show … that you can turn something negative into something positive by deconstructing and rearranging it,” the 44-year-old graphic designer says in the Viennese cafe, where he can be observed once a week working for a few hours.
