On the night of May 10, 1933, shortly after the Nazi Party took power in Germany, Nazi-affiliated student groups publicly burned 25,000 “un-German” books, including works by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. At the same time, another volume, written by Adolf Hitler, was on its way to becoming a national bestseller. An autobiography-cum–political diatribe, Mein Kampf laid bare the aspiring dictator’s fanatical hatred. The book was so incendiary that it has been illegal in Germany since 1945, but a new exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum shows a different approach to extinguishing Mein Kampf’s mythic power.

Several years ago, the French painter Linda Ellia dismembered a copy and distributed its 600 pages to anyone she could interest in responding to Hitler’s screed—fellow artists and even strangers she met on the street. The results of Ellia’s experiment, an exhibit called “Our Struggle,” are intermittently interesting and occasionally brilliant. The weakest submissions use the paper merely as a background for grisly illustrations or—as in the case of a page titled My Kampfetti—as something to turn into a party decoration. Far more powerful are the works that directly confront Hitler with the consequences of his beliefs, such as a page of text (shown above) obscured by the broken eyeglasses of concentration-camp victims. Feb. 11–June 8, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St., S.F., 415-655-7800, thecjm.org