By the time the first edition of Mein Kampf was released, the humiliation of the armistice of World War I had festered in the hearts of Germans for years. The national economy had collapsed and Germany had been internationally isolated.  Germans took pride in the idea of German superiority and everything German. The book’s forecast of a glorious German future was embraced by the downtrodden and emotionally defeated German people. Hitler may not have been a skilled writer but he certainly understood the psyche of post-War World I Germany.

At the time of his death, Adolf Hitler was a resident of Munich. Consequently, his estate, including the rights to Mein Kampf, escheated to the State of Bavaria. It acquired the copyright to the book. Because of an agreement with Germany, Bavaria refused to allow any republications of Mein Kampf. Owning and selling the book has always been legal in Germany. There are thousands of original hard copies of the book in circulation outside of Germany as the property of governments and private citizens.

As per German copyright law,  the entire text entered the public domain on January 1, 2016. The debate over Adolf Hitler’s book has begun again in earnest. Before the end of the Second World War, more than 12 million copies “Mein Kempf” had been sold in Germany alone. The book is now being sold again and it is flying off the shelves. It appears that most people are purchasing the new release more as a collector’s item and not for its literary or political value.

This past Friday at a press conference, Andreas Wirschig, who is the director of the  Munich Institute for Contemporary History, discussed the institute’s publication of the book. Officials at the Institute decided to initially print only 4000 copies. Demand for the new release of Mein Kampf exceeded expectations. Present orders for the 2000-page annotated book exceed 15,000. Explaining why the book is heavily annotated, Wirschig said that Institute wanted to destroy book’s cult status.

The Institute was founded at the end of the Second World War. Its mandate is to research and report on dictatorships in the 20th century, the history of democracy, and processes of Historical Transformation: Germany and Europe since the 1970s. Researchers at the Institute work closely with academic institutions. The Institute produces the highest quality research work. Unfortunately, the liberal politics of today have unnecessarily tainted the Institute’s reputation for unbiased and scholarly investigations.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Institute’s reprinting of Mein Kampf with pages of annotation is an attempt to discredit the work of Adolf Hitler. I am not saying that the content of Mein Kampf should not be scrutinized and commented upon. However, I believe that the reader should be allowed to read the same work that was read by Germans more than 70 years ago. At that time, readers of the book read Mein Kampf without annotations of any kind. Officials at the Institute are aware that the book has been the subject of hundreds of essays and literary works that have intensely analyzed Hitler’s every word.

I do not believe that democracy is served by explaining history according to the political winds of the time. Today’s explosion in the dissemination of information and our ability to almost instantly research any topic makes annotating Mein Kampf for the purposes of recasting history unnecessary and insulting. We can formulate our own opinions. Isn’t this our right?

Each day we are bombarded by offensive and violent manifestos and threatening declarations calling for the end of our way of life. Jihadi John appears in YouTube videos spouting hate and violence right before he beheads an infidel. Those in power cannot annotate everything we read or hear. Present day democracies must avoid censoring information like old-school Latin American dictators did. Today, the average person is capable of reading with comprehension and formulating reasonable opinions as to the content of what has been read.

I just finished reading an unannotated English version of Mein Kampf. It is clear to me that is was written as a political manifesto for the German people. I do not believe that Hitler believed that the book would propel him into the Chancellor’s office.