The Mark 2010

The copyright on Mein Kampf will expire in 2015. It's high time Germans see what a ridiculous text it is.

When the Allied armies freed Germany in 1945, Adolf Hitler killed himself in his underground bunker. Of the many legacies he left behind, one was his political manifesto Mein Kampf, written while he was imprisoned for the failed coup he staged in 1923. Post-war Europe was literally swamped with copies of the book – more than 10 million had been printed, mostly, but not all, in German.

So when I started studying the history of the Third Reich, I went looking for a copy of the book that every couple had been given on their wedding day in Nazi Germany. The university's library had one, but I wanted my own. This proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated.

What I had not considered was the ruthless censoring in Germany after 1945. After Hitler's suicide, the rights to Mein Kampf went to the state of Bavaria, which declared the publishing of the book illegal.

Since I could not buy a new copy, I went to antique book dealers. Mein Kampf must be the most thrown away book ever printed – millions of copies were destroyed during pre-occupation German housecleaning done to avoid the suspicion of being a Nazi –supporter – but there are still copies to be had.

The book dealer I went to had three of them but I still failed in my endeavour – the asking price for a beat-up copy from 1942 was over $100. And to buy it, I would have to prove I was studying history with a signed paper from the institute of modern history. Dumbfounded, I decided to get the book from the library after all.

The question of why Mein Kampf was so hard to obtain left me thinking, though. Why was it suppressed?

Apparently, the book is considered to be some kind of Nazi pandora's box, the evil within too dangerous for German minds to be exposed to. Indeed, while the text is dreadful, pretentious, stupid, and downright annoying, it does give good insight into Hitler's thinking. It describes not only his anti-Semitism and his idea of establishing a dictatorship, but also his plan to acquire, i.e. conquer "Lebensraum im Osten" (literally "living space in the east"). It is thus a text that stands contrary to everything post-war democratic Germany stands for.

Nevertheless, there is an ongoing discussion – and not just among historians – about whether banning the book was the right idea. Is it really so dangerous that it has to be kept under lock and key? Will publishing the book damage Germany's reputation?

As it stands, anyone who really wants to get their hands on the text can do so in Germany. There have been numerous illegal reprintings, mostly by right wing groups outside of Germany, and a simple search on the internet reveals dozens of sites where it can be downloaded for free, although not in Germany, where search engines like Google filter the results.

The problem of proliferation, however, will become a lot bigger in 2015 when the copyright runs out 70 years after Hitler's death. After that, anyone will be able to publish the book.

In July, the "Institut für Zeitgeschichte" in Munich declared it was in a "constructive dialogue" with the Bavarian ministry of finance about a new annotated edition, which will hopefully be published in six years’ time. The new edition will feature comments by historians, a comparison of the various versions, and will show where Hitler got his ideas from.

It is a momentous feat and high time, too. Eventually, everyone in Germany will be able to read the book and see what has been carefully hidden from them. They will see what kind of abstruse, fanatical, absurd, and strange ideas formed in the head of the "Grössten Führer aller Zeiten," the so-called greatest leader of all time. They will also see how bad of a writer he actually was.

Being able to read the text will help demystify his "genius" more than any scientific exmanination would be able to.