A scandal that is still a long way, but it sure will go up: If the end of January, the first 15-page annotated excerpt from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is located at the kiosk must adapt its British publisher Peter McGee probably back to a process. Four years ago, a lawsuit ensued between McGee and the Bavarian Ministry of Finance, it was about the journalistic project Zeitungszeugen, a facsimile collection of newspapers from the years 1933 to 1945. McGee then won on appeal.

Now the next case. Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Germany is still not released for reproduction. The Bavarian Ministry of the responsibility after the war, the rights to it wakes up, since any form strictly on its distribution, since the Scripture, it is said, could raise “bad memories”.

The question that arises now is, not whether you find it particularly tasteful to see parts of an anti-Semitic diatribe in magazine departments. It’s about whether Hitler’s manifesto, scarce 67 years after his death, must be kept under lock and key. Of what is here, who are protected?

Woe to him who it hits!

The belief that contact with the book would immediately trigger a return to darker times, comes from a notion, as they are today really only knows from the fairy tale literature, Department of Fantasy: evil tomes, which guarded deep in dark Spukschlosskellern of an Arcane Circle be. Woe to him who only hits!

This fiction is dangerous for two reasons. First, it gives – unintentionally or not – Hitler’s writing a mystical aura toxic, whose strength seems hardly manageable. Second, they are reproduced, also unwittingly or not, the still popular superstition, the Germans were during the Second World War itself simply victims of that mumbo jumbo become seductive, before we would have to be preserved even today. Historians have since long been proven not to the contrary?

It is true that Hitler’s book is almost unreadable. Of these, anyone can convince a library card or with access to the Internet, where the Scripture without commentary and usually circulated on right-wing sites. That the inhuman hatred Hitler not only the spirit but also the language has turned is, alone, however, no reason to agree to a release. Rather, it is likely that even if I fight a brilliantly written work, not that this thought is not to be obvious, while at the same time constant of the figure Hitler in films, political discussions and – at the kiosk, he is not even new – magazines are exposed . A society must endure. And they are holding.

Quite regardless of whether the publisher McGee has really only the pure enlightenment in mind or not speculate on a greedy interest – a point he is right: Mein Kampf must be demystified. Whether it succeeds with its piecemeal served excerpts, is certainly questionable. The National Institute for Contemporary History prepares its fully annotated edition for the year 2015. Then the copyright has expired. The Bavarian Ministry of Finance has announced his opposition anyway.