In Jan. 2016, for the first time since the end of World War II, Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) is going to be republished in Germany. The government-funded Institute of Contemporary History in Munich (IfZ) will print up to 4,000 copies of an annotated version of the text, which includes more than 3,000 scholarly notes.
IfZ director Andreas Wirsching says these annotations will “shatter the myth” surrounding the text, according to the BBC. Although it is already in publication outside of the country, Mein Kampf has not been reprinted locally since Germany’s defeat in 1945, when the copyright was assumed by the regional Bavarian government, which prohibited its replication. That copyright expires at the end of 2015.
As the Washington Post noted earlier this year, many scholars and librarians view Mein Kampf as a “toxic” and dangerous text.