Book Burning In Nazi Germany

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“‘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

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