“‘Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings,’” Heinrich Heine once stated through his famous 1821 play Almansor. The concept of Heine’s well-known relies on the fact that when people burn books, they are initially destroying the author's’ ideas and eventually the authors themselves. Nevertheless, the destruction of ideas through burning books has surfaced during the Nazi regime after World War I. During this time, the Nazi party burned books in Germany, with the most notable one being the May 1933 book burning in Nazi Germany. Among those that were destroyed include well-known socialists such as Bertolt Brecht, “corrupting foreign influences” such as Ernest Hemingway, and early German literary critics of the Nazi …show more content…
After the famous 1933 Nazi book burning, 100,000 people marched in New York City to protest the event, while other demonstrations occurred in cities including Philadelphia and St. Louis. The American media as well as many others responded with shock to this “purging” of Germany. New York Herald Tribune columnist Walter Lippmann was one of the few journalists who took the book burnings as a warning of the future that the Nazis may have conceived. “‘These acts symbolize the moral and intellectual character of the Nazi regime,’ he wrote. ‘For these bonfires are not the work of schoolboys or mobs but of the present German Government ... The ominous symbolism of these bonfires is that there is a government in Germany which means to teach its people that their salvation lies in violence’" (Germany, 1993). Helen Keller, one of many authors whose works were burned by the Nazis, also reacted to this, writing a letter to the student body of Germany. “‘History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas,’ Keller wrote. ‘Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them. You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels, and will continue to quicken other minds’” (Helen Keller). From analytical examination of these statements, one can infer that even though the Nazis believe that their views are more virtuous and respectable, others may not think so and have the freedom to contradict these claims. This also dictates that when modern societies have the right to contradict views that seeme to be respectable, it allows the concept of good vs. evil and justice vs. injustice to develop in the government as well as the citizens. Otherwise, the line between justice and injustice is blurred, making the
Throughout the Holocaust, the Jews were continuously dehumanized by the Nazis. However, these actions may not have only impacted the Jews, but they may have had the unintended effect of dehumanizing the Nazis as well. What does this say about humanity? Elie Wiesel and Art Spiegelman both acknowledge this commentary in their books, Night and Maus. The authors demonstrate that true dehumanization reveals that the nature of humanity is not quite as structured as one might think.
Once Montag witnesses the unethical extent that the firemen would go through to destroy the existence of books, he realizes how corrupt and unjust the societal rules were. “He looked with dismay at the floor. ‘We burned an old woman with her books” (47).
Books are banned by the government in the dystopian society that brings the unstable perspective of not knowing what is good and what is wrong. The people of this society think that books will take away their happiness and ruin their lives. However, the government hides a secret that it uses to gain control over the citizens and change their minds. At the beginning of the book, Montag starts off by revealing his perspective on burning, “It was a pleasure to burn” (1). At this point it wasn’t clear who said this but whoever it was, they seem to like burning. In our society you were not able to burn things without permission unless it was on your property. Later in the book, the novel reveals that Montag, a fireman was the one that said the previous
Heinrich Heine’s article on the connection of the Holocaust to book burning presents multiple concepts on the idea of burning books. Throughout the text the author presents his overall purpose on the importance of the act of burning and reveals the possibility of burning burning being inherently sinister. Many of his comments relate to the novel Fahrenheit 451 in which book burning also takes place. Overall, Heinrich Heine opened up new ideas on book burning and its impact on societies over the years.
In the late 1930s complaisant European nations were lulled into the jaws of the very dangerous “victim/slave mentality.” Weak democracies tried placating and accommodating the tyrannical proponents of the Communist, Socialist and Fascist ideologies and Europe soon found itself in jeopardy with maniacs like Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini threatening the existence of taken-for-granted freedom and human rights. Thanks to the intervention of the United States Hitler and Mussolini were defeated (despite incredible adversity) and Europe was salvaged from the scourge of Fascism. But Nazi Fascism did not go away meekly. Its defeat required intensive struggle, sacrifice and perseverance with over 50 million military and civilian deaths occurring during the widespread devastation.
This realization brought back a terror here we are again, in the same position (Downs 1). The debate was whether the Nazis had rights. The Jews felt that the Nazi march inflicted mental trauma, triggering painful memories (Downs 93). The Skokie Jews felt that the Nazis should not be protected by the First Amendment and stated, "Defenders of free speech who retain their good sense will realize the Nazis, saying what they say in the way they say it, do exceed reasonable limits" (Bartlett 139).
To start, the novel Fahrenheit 451 describes the fictional futuristic world in which our main protagonist Guy Montag resides. Montag is a fireman, but not your typical fireman. In fact, firemen we see in our society are the ones, who risk their lives trying to extinguish fires; however, in the novel firemen are not such individuals, what our society think of firemen is unheard of by the citizens of this futuristic American country. Instead firemen burn books. They erase knowledge. They obliterate the books of thinkers, dreamers, and storytellers. They destroy books that often describe the deepest thoughts, ideas, and feelings. Great works such as Shakespeare and Plato, for example, are illegal and firemen work to eradicate them. In the society where Guy Montag lives, knowledge is erased and replaced with ignorance. This society also resembles our world, a world where ignorance is promoted, and should not be replacing knowledge. This novel was written by Ray Bradbury, He wrote other novels such as the Martian chronicles, the illustrated man, Dandelion wine, and something wicked this way comes, as well as hundreds of short stories, he also wrote for the theater, cinema, and TV. In this essay three arguments will be made to prove this point. First the government use firemen to get rid of books because they are afraid people will rebel, they use preventative measures like censorship to hide from the public the truth, the government promotes ignorance to make it easier for them to control their citizens. Because the government makes books illegal, they make people suppress feelings and also makes them miserable without them knowing.
Fritzsche, Peter. Life and Death in the Third Reich. 1st Ed. ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP,
Fascism --a political philosophy that exalts nation and often race above the individual-- lays the underpinnings for the Nazi regimen. Ipso facto, it is not unfo...
Rubinstein, William D. The Myth of Bombing Auschwitz. The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis. London: Routledge, 1997. 157-81. Print.
Botwinick writes in A History of the Holocaust, “The principle that resistance to evil was a moral duty did not exist for the vast majority of Germans. Not until the end of the war did men like Martin Niemoeller and Elie Wiesel arouse the world’s conscience to the realization that the bystander cannot escape guilt or shame” (pg. 45). In The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick writes of a world where Niemoeller and Wiesel’s voices never would have surfaced and in which Germany not only never would have repented for the Holocaust, but would have prided itself upon it. Dick writes of a world where this detached and guiltless attitude prevails globally, a world where America clung on to its isolationist policies, where the Axis powers obtained world domination and effectively wiped Jews from the surface, forcing all resistance and culture to the underground and allowing for those in the 1960’s Nazi world to live without questioning the hate they were born into.
After World War II, the people of Germany endured torment from their conquerors in many forms, from being stolen from, to be tortured or killed. Over ten million Germans were forced to move out of their homes. Around half a million of those that were moved died on their journeys elsewhere, while others suffered greatly from famine, cold, and dehydration (Douglas). At a number this large, surely some of the people that lived in Germany were against the war. This begs the question: Why should all of the people of Germany suffer because of Hitler’s wrongdoings? Every day, German citizens were pushed off land that had belonged to them, regardless of their position on the war.
To this day it remains incomprehensible to justify a sensible account for the uprising of the Nazi Movement. It goes without saying that the unexpectedness of a mass genocide carried out for that long must have advanced through brilliant tactics implemented by a strategic leader, with a promising policy. Adolf Hitler, a soldier in the First World War himself represents the intolerant dictator of the Nazi movement, and gains his triumph by arousing Germany from its devastated state following the negative ramifications of the war. Germany, “foolishly gambled away” by communists and Jews according to Hitler in his chronicle Mein Kampf, praises the Nazi Party due to its pact to provide order, racial purity, education, economic stability, and further benefits for the state (Hitler, 2.6). Albert Speer, who worked closely under Hitler reveals in his memoir Inside the Third Reich that the Führer “was tempestuously hailed by his numerous followers,” highlighting the appreciation from the German population in response to his project of rejuvenating their state (Speer, 15). The effectiveness of Hitler’s propaganda clearly served its purpose in distracting the public from suspecting the genuine intentions behind his plan, supported by Albert Camus’ insight in The Plague that the “townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences”(Camus, 37). In this sense “humanists” represent those who perceive all people with virtue and pureness, but the anti-humanist expression in the metaphor shows the blind-sidedness of such German citizens in identifying cruel things in the world, or Hitler. When the corruption within Nazism does receive notice, Hitler at that point given h...
I believe that although Hitler terrorized the Jews, they continued to be stronger than ever, and tried to keep up their society. Lucy Dawidowicz, the author of “The War Against The Jews 1933-1945” grew up in New York. She was born in 1915. Lucy started her undergraduate studies at Hunter College, where she studied English. After completing her undergraduate with tremendous achievement, she started going to Columbia University to finish getting her masters in English Literature.
The holocaust attested that morality is adaptable in severe conditions. Traditional morality stopped to be contained by the barbed wires of the concentration camps. Inside the camps, prisoners were not dealt like humans and thus adapted animal-like behavior needed to survive. The “ordinary moral world” (86) Primo Levi refers in his autobiographical novel Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man or Survival in Auschwitz), stops to exist; the meanings and applications of words such as “good,” “evil,” “just,” and “unjust” begin to merge and the differences between these opposites turn vague. Continued existence in Auschwitz demanded abolition of one’s self-respect and human dignity. Vulnerability to unending dehumanization certainly directs one to be dehumanized, thrusting one to resort on mental, physical, and social adaptation to be able to preserve one’s life and personality. It is in this adaptation that the line distinguishing right and wrong starts to deform.