The copyright to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle, translated) belongs to the German state of Bavaria and expires on December 31, 2015. Bavaria does not allow the book to be reprinted, although possession of Mein Kampf is not illegal in Germany.
Although the expiration of copyright is eight years away, Horst Möller, a German historian and director of the Munich Institute of Contemporary History, has stoked raw emotions by calling for the book to be published in a scholarly edition before the expiration of the copyright, Reuters reported this week. Möller’s thesis is that with the expiration of the copyright and the book reverting to the public domain there will be a feeding frenzy among publishers that may bring undeserved sensationalism to Hitler’s anti-Semitic work. He believes it’s best to publish a carefully annotated edition before 2015 that will expose Hitler’s theories as bogus. "You can be sure it will be sold as a sensation," in 2015, Möller told Reuters. "You could prevent that happening," said Möller, "if an academic edition of the book was already available."
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