MUNICH, Germany, Dec. 2 (UPI) — Adolf Hitler’s manifesto “Mein Kampf” is about to be published in Germany for the first time since the end of World War II.
The copyright, assigned after the war to the German state of Bavaria, will expire at the end of 2015, 70 years after the author’s death, and the book will enter the public domain, allowing a scholarly and heavily annotated version to be released.
Hitler wrote the two-volume “Mein Kampf” while serving time in prison in the early 1920s. Volume 1 was released in 1925, and Volume 2 in 1926.
A new, two-volume edition, in German, is the culmination of a three-year scholarly undertaking by the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, a noted center of the historical study of Nazism, and will be sold for $62 (59 euros) beginning in early January.
The nearly 2,000-page book combines a memoir of failures, both Hitler’s and Germany’s, with an explanation of how to gain political power and an anti-Semitic rant that laid the foundation for German oppression of Jews prior to and during the war. It includes nearly 3,500 annotations, typically several on every page, to provide historical context.
“We wanted literally to surround Hitler with our comments,” said Christian Hartmann, lead scholar on the five-person team editing the book, at an announcement of the book’s release Tuesday.
Bavaria’s hold on the copyright has essentially banned publication of the work in Germany until now, although it is available on the Internet and was published in 18 languages during Nazi rule.
“The problem with ‘Mein Kampf’ is that everyone knows the title but nothing of the book itself. The myth is that it is banned, and so dangerous that the German public cannot be trusted with it,” Sven-Felix Kellerhof, historian and editor at the German newspaper Die Welt, told the New York Times in an interview.
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