Heather Horn: Germany's Outdated, Wrongheaded Ban on Nazi Books Like 'Mein Kampf'

Heather Horn is a writer based in Chicago. She is a former features editor and staff writer for The Atlantic Wire, and was previously a research assistant at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

There's something deeply distasteful about the news out of Germany this week. It's not that the latest edition of a British publisher's excerpts of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf has sold 250,000 copies in just a few days. It's that the Bavarian state government, which technically owns the copyright, is considering fighting it.

Hitler's ideological dumping ground of an autobiography isn't technically banned in Germany. But it might as well be. The finance ministry of the state of Bavaria, in the south, holds the copyrights to Mein Kampf and has simply refused to let it be republished. It's done the same for other Nazi works. This same British publisher, Peter McGee of Albertas Ltd., reprinted parts of Nazi newspapers in 2009 with accompanying historical commentary, and the Bavarian government, holding the copyrights to those papers as well, had police seize the publications....

To put it simply: fighting reprints is no protection against fascism, or even against poor taste and inflammatory rhetoric. Quite the contrary. This latest debate has a particularly nonsensical ring, as the attention has already been drawn -- and the entire work is available on the internet anyway. But don't let the nonsense obscure what is truly an important point: either you believe in liberalism or you don't. And even if the letter of the German law isn't one of censorship -- though legislating against the swastika and Holocaust denial suggests otherwise -- the Bavarian state is misusing its power. This sort of illiberal policy made even the postwar  occupying powers pretty squeamish when they removed propaganda from public libraries -- and that was when the wounds were still fresh, and onetime Nazis plentiful. Today, there's no excuse.