There may be no greater taboo in Germany than to republish Adolf Hitler’s vile manifesto “Mein Kampf.” But historians in Munich are about to break it.
The Institute for Contemporary History will reprint the murderous dictator’s book and sell it in book stores for 59 Euros a copy starting in January.
It will not appear in its original form but be heavily annotated to expose the “lies, half-truths and vicious tirades” behind a vision of hostility that ended in the deaths of tens of millions of people in World War II.
A legal hitch makes republication possible.
The copyright on “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”) runs out on January 1, 2016, 70 years after Hitler’s death.
At the end of World War II, the Allies had transferred it to the state of Bavaria, which applied it to enforce a ban on reprints.
With it gone, the historians see themselves obliged to be the ones to republish.
“The aim of this edition is thus to present ‘Mein Kampf’ as a salient source document for contemporary history, to describe the context of the genesis of Hitler’s worldview,” the institute said.
The rantings of a madman may not have been of historic interest, had they not become reality, the institute said.
“Perhaps never in history did a ruler write down before he came to power what he was to do afterward as precisely as Adolf Hitler,” said historian Eberhard Jäckel. “It is only their (the writing’s) translation into reality that raises them to the level of a historical source.”
“Mein Kampf” was originally around 600 pages long, and the book sported Hitler’s photo with the title splashed across a red banner. The annotations swell the institute’s version, which is titled “Hitler, mein Kampf,” to about 2,000 pages. Its cover is a sober gray in gray with no artwork.
Any republication or distribution of the original book without proper annotation is to remain illegal in Germany.