In fact, the book's contents were considered potent and infectious enough that the postwar administration in Allied-occupied Germany banned its publication, a prohibition that German authorities maintained, and which is to remain in place until the end of 2015, when the copyright expires. What happens then is the object of intense discussion and soul-searching in Germany, where, 67 years after the war's end, freedom of speech is still curtailed when it promotes Nazi ideology.
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Most observers feel that Germans have long possessed the political sophistication to have Mein Kampf readily available in bookstores, and that the ban has outlived its purpose. "
German society as a whole is now mature enough," says Bernd Wagner, an
expert on right-wing extremism who runs a program for neo-Nazis opting to leave the scene.
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"Mein Kampf is like a rusty old grenade. We want to remove its detonator," explains Christian Hartmann, who leads the Munich team. "We intend to defuse the book. This way it will lose its symbolic value and become what it really is: a piece of historical evidence—nothing more."
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More generally, Schoeps (director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, at the University of Potsdam) argues that annotations should be ample, not just minimal footnotes, and that they should explicitly underscore connections and explain nuances.
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Germany's democratic socialist party, the Left Party, blasts the annotated version as a misguided approach. "The right-wing scene has always had access to the book," said a news release from the party, "and
an annotated edition simply contributes to the wider dissemination of fascist thinking under the guise of scholarship." The Left Party, particularly strong in eastern Germany, maintains that Mein Kampf should be banned completely in Germany, because it constitutes inflammatory fascist propaganda.
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But the historian Frei responds that "in order to prevent publication, the state would either have to prove it was inflammatory or create a new law. Why should we give Adolf Hitler the honor of going to so much trouble so long after his death?"
So much care and frustration for a ninety year old book that writes the truth. Anyway, nobody beats Germans when it comes to quasi-religious servility before Jews...
