There can hardly be anyone who knows Mein Kampf better than Serdar Somuncu. The 47-year-old Turkish-born German cabaret artist spent five years touring Germany with The Legacy of a Mass Murderer, his satirical reading of Adolf Hitler’s incendiary text, which he performed more than 1,400 times, to 250,000 people. At a particularly memorable performance a few years ago in the town of Dippoldiswalde in Saxony, which has a reputation as a neo-Nazi stronghold, 25 young far-right protesters gatecrashed his show, their faces covered in scarves and balaclavas; Somuncu let them take over the stage and hold high their protest banner, which read: “Stop the jokes – let’s have arguments not humiliation!”

Somuncu carried on with his act in the stalls, seemingly unperturbed, though far from oblivious to their presence. “I’ll just continue quoting Hitler,” he said as he dipped into volume 1, chapter 11 of Mein Kampf, titled Race and People, in which the Nazi leader unleashes an arsenal of hate-filled diatribes towards Jews, including outlining his plans to eliminate them.

“The truth is so plain to see … that everyone blindly passes it by,” Somuncu quoted as his audience laughed nervously before applauding as police gathered to escort the protesters out.

On 1 January, Mein Kampf will become a book just like any other – at least in terms of its legal status – when publication of it in Germany will be allowed for the first time in 70 years, after its copyright expires.

But of course it is not a book like any other, rather one of the most contentious texts ever written, and there is no sign that the nervousness surrounding it or the fascination it attracts are going to dissipate anytime soon.

The occasion has been met with trepidation, confronting Germans once again with the question of how to deal with the legacy of Hitler, and authorities with widespread fears over the text’s power to arouse Nazi sympathies.

There are plenty of people willing to dismiss the work as badly written and grammatically incorrect (it has often been called Sein Krampf or “His Cramp” for those very reasons), as well as intellectually inferior and irrelevant to modern times. But for Somuncu – who often took police advice and performed in a bulletproof vest, amid fears that his ridiculing of the text endangered his own safety – its existence needs to be taken seriously; particularly, he says, at a time when the recent refugee crisis has seen Germany welcome around a million newcomers, stirring mixed feelings. The number of attacks on asylum-seekers’ homes has risen.

“Mein Kampf is an indicator of where ideologies can lead, when you fail to deal with your past,” he said in a recent interview to publicise his new book, Der Adolf in Mir (The Adolf in Me). In it he describes how the trigger for his performances was the attacks on asylum-seekers in Germany in the early 90s, which have clear parallels with today.

“I didn’t think it was enough to go on candlelit processions … I wanted to stand at the frontline and have a dialogue with the people who wanted to keep the spirit of Mein Kampf alive,” he said.

Somuncu is among those who believe the book itself will not take off in terms of sales, describing it as “enervating and boring”, but he is convinced that the fascination for it would be far more muted now, had German authorities – more specifically the Bavarian government, which has held the rights to it – been more open about it.

Sven Felix Kellerhoff, author of Mein Kampf: The Career of a German book, agreed. “If politicians had not effectively tried to ban this book over many years, to keep it out of the public domain, we wouldn’t be experiencing the amount of excitement and controversy we’re seeing now,” he said.

Written during Hitler’s time in prison following his failed 1923 putsch, the book – a mix of autobiography, political manifesto, antisemitic diatribe and instructions on how to gain power – became a bestseller from 1933 onwards, selling a total of 12.5m copies. After the war it was left to the Americans to decide what to do with it, as Hitler had been registered as living in Munich, which was in the US sector. They passed the rights to the state of Bavaria, who forbade its republication. So while Mein Kampf has always been available in a wide range of translations, and online versions abound, in Germany it has until now only been available in libraries (released only under tight supervision from so-called “poison cabinets”), in antique bookshops (where buyers are often requested to give their names and addresses prior to a transaction), or on the internet.

Authorising the book’s release into the public domain has been a tortuous process. In 2012 it was agreed, after much consultation between Bavarian authorities and representatives of Jewish and Roma communities, that a scholarly edition should be planned in an attempt to demystify the book. Munich’s Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) was appointed to oversee the project.

But that same year Bavaria’s prime minister, Horst Seehofer, visited Israel, where he was met with staunch opposition to the project. The state pulled out, leaving the institute to continue on its own.

“It is completely nonsensical,” says Kellerhoff, “to forbid an annotated, scientifically critical edition, while uncommented versions – there are at least 20 German-language ones alone – are available on the internet to anyone who wants to find them.”

The historians plugged on regardless, convinced, according to IfZ director Andreas Wirsching, of the necessity of an annotated edition, “without which I am completely at the mercy of this concoction of lies, half-truths and propaganda”.

Christian Hartmann, one of the team of five historians from the IfZ who spent several years working on the academic edition, described his relief at being able to analyse the text, even if he felt in need of regularly airing his tiny Munich office in order to cope with the task.

“It is a real feeling of triumph, to be able to pick over this rubbish and then to debunk it bit by bit,” he said at a recent media presentation. From the original book’s 1,000 pages, the IfZ – working with experts including economists, geneticists and Japanologists – has produced a two-volume book that is twice as long as the original, with no less than 3,700 annotations.

The team’s intention, Hartmann said, was to put the work in its historical context, “to show how Hitler mixed truths and half-truths with lies, to take the sting out of the propaganda at the same time as laying Nazism bare”.

Pointing to one claim peddled in the text, that “the press is dominated by Jews”, Hartmann said: “Of course there were lots of Jews in the media. We explain why that was the case. They were excluded from public administration and from the army, so of course, many went into media.”

Othmar Plöckinger, another IfZ historian whose job was to concentrate on references to the early history of the Nazi party, said having a thorough knowledge of the text meant he and his colleagues were able to cope with the notorious and often nauseating sentiments contained within it.

“A doctor who repeatedly keels over in front of his patient is not a very good doctor,” he said.

As well as being able to piece together some of the secondary literature Hitler would have turned to, the historians also rubbished the claim by many Germans after the war that not many of them actually read the book – and by extension could not have known what Hitler planned to do.

“You just need to look at the high frequency with which it was borrowed from the library to be able to say that it certainly didn’t gather dust on the shelf,” Plockinger said.

For decades Germany didn’t talk about Mein Kampf, as if it wanted to duck the question of how a dictator – years before he came to power – managed to present his plans in the form of a book, a copy of which was subsequently owned by almost everyone, and to get away with it.

“It is quite astonishing how much of what is described was later realised,” said Hartmann. “I mean, we’re all wiser in retrospect, but nevertheless, (the book) made fairly clear just what Hitler intended.”

Ahead of the lifting of the copyright, and the publication of the scholarly version on 8 January, the reemergence of the book has spawned a theatre production, which investigates what happened to it after 1945, hours of chat-show fodder, a television documentary called Countdown to the Breaking of a Taboo, and even a transgender comedy.

While German justice ministers have pledged that they will be on guard to ensure not too many people gain access to it, and will take measures including the prosecution of anyone who uses it to “incite the people”, they will take some comfort that, at €59 and 2,000 pages, and with an initial print run of just 4,000 copies, it is unlikely to become a bestseller.

Most Jewish leaders in Germany have reluctantly accepted the scholarly edition, but have admitted their nervousness that the copyright has expired, saying that they too will be closely monitoring what happens, and will intervene to stop plain, non-academic editions.

“Prosecutors should crack down hard on the distribution and sale of the non-annotated book,” said Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

But Schuster’s predecessor, Dieter Graumann, has been outspoken about his misgivings, arguing that the book’s republication in any form is an insult to Holocaust survivors. “Even the mere thought of a new publication in Germany is beyond the pale, and is contrary to my beliefs as to how we should fight neo-facism and rightwing extremism,” he said. “It does brutal injury to the feelings of survivors of the Shoah.”

Experts in the field of rightwing extremism say it is unlikely that the book will create many waves in far-right circles. It has been available to anyone who really wanted to own a copy. And its real importance is as a symbol, a Third Reich souvenir, rather than as something to read.

Bookshops have been at pains to stress that they will not be putting it in their windows alongside current bestsellers such as Swedish thrillers and books about Pope Francis and Isis. “Customers will have to specifically ask for it, and we will order it for them, but we won’t stock it,” said a Berlin bookseller. “We’ve had the first inquiries. One person was at pains to stress that he was a teacher, but he asked about it as if he was asking us to produce explicit porn from behind the counter.”