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vegainthemirror t1_iu3dni8 wrote

Reply to comment by GrymanOne in TIL that Fahrenheit 451, a book about a distopian future where books are banned and burned, was banned and burned by the apartheid regime in South Africa with other tens of thousands. by open_closet

It is now, because it is public domain. Up until 2015, 70 years after ole Adolf's death, it wasn't possible to have it legally republished

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madnessmaka t1_iu3i9nh wrote

I laugh thinking of his estate taking people to court over copyright infringement.

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vegainthemirror t1_iu3j5j5 wrote

It was less of an estate, but more of a general (governmental?) agreement that anything AH-/Mein Kampf-related was not allowed for use to the public. At least in german-speaking countries

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Salty_Animator_4019 t1_iu4e5sg wrote

The government of the German state Bavaria took over the copyright from the original publisher after the Nazi time and tried to ensure that the book was not published other than perhaps in a scientific research context. This ended when the copyright ran out 70 years after Adolf Hitlers death.

A new, official version WITH critical annotations was made available, since this year also in a free edition on the internet (in German): https://www.mein-kampf-edition.de/

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arcosapphire t1_iu68no2 wrote

What? Back around 2000, my mom got me a copy, I assume from B&N. It certainly wasn't banned.

I feel obligated to add a disclaimer: my mom is Jewish and it was for educational reasons to understand history. That said, I couldn't make it more than a couple of pages in. I was expecting some intelligent but misguided philosophy that I could eruditely analyze and go, "aha, here was where he went wrong" and pat myself on the back. Instead it's a bunch of immediately blathering nonsense. Which is educational in a different way, relevant to note recent events this very article is tangentially related to, that such nonsense can actually get people politically pumped. But I don't think more than a couple of pages would have been necessary to learn that anyway.

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vegainthemirror t1_iu696lh wrote

Depends where. In german-speaking countries, it was banned, difdicult if not impossible to obtain it, physically and digitally. I know of a history teacher at my high school who somehow was able to get a copy from somewhere, but we've never seen it, let alone read from it.

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arcosapphire t1_iu6acyp wrote

Yeah, it was rather famously censored in Germany. But I don't think there was any restriction in the US, certainly not something about publishing rights and public domain. The 70 year copyright thing is also country-specific and thus couldn't explain it being somehow unattainable anywhere. Which it wasn't.

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