The Book Problem

Sometime in about four weeks.....Mein Kampf (Adoph Hitler's book) will be allowed to be printed and sold in Germany.  Since 1945, it's been on the forbidden list and tightly controlled by the Bavarian government (who was given control of the book by the US Army).  It would be curious how the US Army dreamed up this arrangement but they figured the Bavarian could best handle this.  So a nifty copyright law protected the book from that point on.

By German law.....the copyright will have run out in 2016 and they couldn't have done much to prevent the printing from occurring.

Naturally, the Germans are fairly crafty at things like this and knew that various implications would make this all a problem.  So they've done a couple of things.

First, they will use the 2015 sedition law change to limit the book to just one publisher and one type of edition. They can do this by claiming the book will incite riots....and the new sedition law will prevent any book, picture, comment, or verbal discussion from occurring.

Second, the organization who got the right to publish?  They will publish a 2,000 page book.  Yeah....I know....the original book was actually two volumes and had a total of 720 pages.  Volume one was mostly a personalized story of Hitler himself and volume two was mostly about the movement itself.

What is hinted is that there will be approximately 1,300 pages of added material by 'social scientists' who will explain each single detail spoke about and offer their personalized analysis of Hitler and the NAZI failures or shortfalls.

The cost of this 2,000 page document?  Currently, they are suggesting something between fifty and sixty Euro.  At this point.....no one has said if any local bookstore will offer the book or if you have to order it on-line.

As for reading a two-thousand page document?  Personally.....it'd be about the last thing on Earth that I'd take as a project.  In some ways, I'm thinking that the social scientists believe that this bulky edition will be enough for most people to turn down and thus never read.

As for critical analysis of the critical analysis?  Well, yeah, that's another problem because some folks will criticize how they critiqued Hitler (or his writer).

Originally, there were roughly fifty to sixty million copies of the book.  No one has ever sat and estimated how many survived the war.  As for how many of these special copies will be printed?   There was one estimate by journalists of 2,000 copies being made.

A book for someone's coffee table?  I can see some intellectual German buying this....reading six pages and then giving up....but leaving it there on the table to start some conversation with a guest who might show up and be all chatty.

You can't really envision this....seventy years after the war.....Germans still so worried about a marginally written book with a thick dose of nationalistic socialism being in the hands of somewhat literate Germans.  Just imagine how they'd freak out over the Bible or Quran if they sat and thought about the hazards or perils involved in their texts.