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The government of the Free State of Bavaria, which holds the book's copyright, has blocked publication of the notorious tome in Germany for the past 70 years, but they never actually instated a law banning it. The German Supreme Court ruled in the 1980s that the possession and sale of the millions of copies printed before the war was perfectly legal (although Bavaria still gets to restrict access to copies in public reference collections). Instead, they have restricted new editions locally and tried to block copies internationally and online using their ownership of the book's copyright, which was seized along with many other Hitler assets in 1945. But as of December 31, 2015, the state's copyright will expire.Still, the expiration doesn't mean that new editions will sail into the public sphere unopposed. State officials and citizens alike have for years been examining ways to either create a new legislative ban or to block the book's publication under national anti-Nazi and anti-defamation laws upon the expiration of the old de faction injunction. Even bodies that once supported controlled, scholastic editions like the IfZ's have now jumped on the opposition bandwagon, which makes it likely that sometime in the next couple of years we're going to see a legal or legislative spat over whether or when Mein Kampf can be banned outright in Germany.The IfZ edition may be at the center of this rancor, as the first known proposed printing of the text and already the subject of some prior political intrigue. The edition was first proposed in 2009 as a collaboration between the IfZ and the government of Bavaria. It was intended as a means of pre-empting neo-Nazi editions of the book and widely disseminating a copy of the text that could be used as a Nazi-critical teaching tool to guide readers exposed to existing or new editions of the text. As of 2012, the government of Bavaria had allocated €500,000 (then $650,000) for the edition's production and promised to help publish the demystifying work.
Annoncering
Annoncering