As Niall Ferguson reported last week, there is widespread concern, from the Prince of Wales and the education secretary, Charles Clarke, to schoolteachers and academics, that teenagers studying history are being overdosed with Hitler and the Nazis. This addicts them to a peculiarly pathological episode in Europe’s 2,000-year history, attenuating to a dozen grim years their consciousness of a great civilisation from which they might derive some inspiration and joy.

As the faux outrage over Silvio Berlusconi’s ironic riposte to a rude German socialist MEP demonstrates, teenagers and their teachers are not the only people suffering from this slightly squalid obsession. As for the row, ask yourself whether you would rather have a night out with Martin Schulz MEP or the crafty and charismatic Italian prime minister.

Stefano Stefani, the Italian tourism minister, has upped the stakes by describing German tourists as beer-swilling louts occupying too much sand and shingle. In retaliation Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, has cancelled his holiday in central Italy in favour of Hanover, where he can hear Robbie Williams and go to the city’s roller disco. German tabloids are awash with stereotypes involving spaghetti. Italian memories of German wartime barbarities have resurfaced.

Oblivious to mounting disquiet (and distaste), the Hitler industry is recycling anything that publishers can dredge up and decorate with a swastika. Touted as this autumn’s “sensation” is the 1928 sequel to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, reissued by a small American publisher, Enigma.

This was never published during Hitler’s lifetime, perhaps because with sluggish sales of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s advisers felt that more of the same turgid stuff might undermine them. Later, after Hitler had come to power, it was thought that publication of the Führer’s unexpurgated reflections on foreign policy might be inexpedient.

Apart from the fact that the English translation has been tarted up, there is nothing especially “new” about the reissued Second Book. It was first published in 1961 and reprinted as recently as 1987. Even Gerhard Weinberg, the scholar who first discovered the manuscript in a Virginia torpedo factory that served as a depository for captured German records, concedes that the writing is execrable and the content soporific.

That alone guarantees its authenticity, since on paper, and in person, the German Führer was almost as much a crashing bore as people who bang on about him at dinner parties.

The immediate pretext for the book was to explain an aspect of Nazi policy that was thought to have cost them nationalist votes in the 1928 elections. Both Austrian and German nationalists were offended by the price Hitler was prepared to pay for an alliance with Mussolini. Hitler was ready to leave Tyrolean ethnic Germans, who had once been subjects of the Hapsburg empire, languishing under Italian rule in the Alto Adige.

Like ethnic Germans in Poland, these people were subjected to aggressive Italianisation policies, although it was the Austrian conservative government rather than the Nazis who were most vocal in defence of this aggrieved minority.

Hitler was determined that the ethnic German tail should not wag the dog: “The foreign policy task of the German Reich as such cannot be determined by the interests of the parts split off from the Reich.”

The ethnic Germans in the Tyrol were expendable if an alliance with fascist Italy would help Germany recover great power status. He sought to cover this admission with bizarre diatribes against the sins of commission and omission of his nationalist detractors.

These included their indifference to “the culture of the homeland being insulted by the most wretched bungling work . . . surrendering the German stage to the race-shame of Jonny spielt auf” — this being an opera by a Czech about a Negro jazz band leader! More topical than the fate of Tyrolese Germans, Hitler’s Second Book contains his most sustained attack on the pan-European movement, which he dismissed as “a fantastic, historically impossible childishness”.

He thought that this was a resentful response by Europeans to American economic hegemony. By constantly going on about how populous Europe was, Hitler thought that the pan-Europeans missed the point that America consisted of people of higher net racial value.