Adolf Hitler's notorious ideological treatise "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle) is likely to remain out of print in Germany after Bavaria's state government said late Tuesday it intends to keep it from being published after the copyright expires in 2015. The move reverses an earlier decision by the state  to support a new annotated German-language edition -- a project long promoted by historians.

The Bavarian governor's chief of staff, Christine Haderthauer, told reporters that the state would file a criminal complaint against anyone who tried to publish the work, adding that it would be contradictory for Bavaria to allow circulation of the book while at the same time participating in thedrive to ban  Germany's main far-right party, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) .

For years, historians at the Munich Institute of Contemporary History have been working on an annotated version of the book , which would include explanations of where some of Hitler's ideas originated. The idea was to deflate some of the intrigue attached to a book that has long been all but verboten in Germany.

Bavaria's About-Face

As of last year, Bavaria's governing conservatives were behind the idea. "We have to deal with the book. It must be demystified," Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Söder told Cicero magazine in 2012. Their current about-face is bad news for the historians at the Munich Institute of Contemporary History. A spokesperson told reporters on Tuesday that they had yet to speak to anyone at the governor's office.