Hitler’s Mein Kampf to be republished

Particularly in Bavaria, the province that holds the copyright, officials have restricted access to the book to prevent inciting interest in Hitler’s hateful ideas.

“It seeks to thoroughly deconstruct Hitler’s propaganda in a lasting manner and thus to undermine the still effective symbolic power of the book”, the Institute for Contemporary History said.

But the historians who want to republish the text say they have good intentions.

About 4,000 copies of the book will be produced in its initial run, and it’s not clear if there will be another.

Hitler wrote the two-volume Mein Kampf while serving time in prison in the early 1920s. Its cover is a sober gray in gray with no artwork.

Aware of the sensitivities involved, the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich that will publish the new edition insisted it is bringing out an “academic work” far removed from any “irresponsible” uncritical publication of Mein Kampf. It was published in 1925 and 1926; in it, Hitler laid out his political philosophy, extolled the importance of propaganda and railed against Jews as “parasites”.

Hitler’s writing style is full of convoluted rants and grandiose formulations.

Free speech advocates have long argued that the ban is an ineffective deterrent in the digital age. The annotations swell the institute’s version, which is titled “Hitler, mein Kampf”, to about 2,000 pages.

In Berlin, old copies of “Mein Kampf” are kept in a secure “poison cabinet”, which Faiola described as “a literary danger zone in the dark recesses of the vast Bavarian State Library”. Germans can easily get their hands on English-language copies of “Mein Kampf” or find the original floating around on the Internet.