The article about %%Keyword%%, which is currently a popular topic of Book everywhere, Is receiving considerable concentration, isn’t it? At present, let’s explore some Book Burnings in Germany, 1933 | American Experience | PBS that you may not know about in this article on Camilledimaio!

The readers’ evaluation of the article Book Burnings in Germany, 1933 | American Experience | PBS

On May 10, 1933, a wave of book burnings swept through 34 university towns in Germany. Over 25,000 works by Jewish authors like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, as well as blacklisted American authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller, were incinerated to the sound of Nazi salutes. In Berlin’s Opera Square, 40,000 people gathered to hear German Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels’s speech. He declared, “The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. … The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. … And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.” Radio stations across Germany broadcast the speeches, songs, and incantations from Berlin, and newspapers proclaimed the “Action against the Un-German Spirit” a success. This marked the beginning of the Nazis’ war on individual expression and “un-German” thought.

Destroying IdeasAmerican organizations, such as the American Jewish Congress, were aware of the planned book burnings as early as two weeks before they were to take place. Helen Keller, whose books were to be included in the bonfires, wrote an open letter to German students at the time. In it, she said: “History has shown that you cannot kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do so many times before, only to have the ideas rise up with might and destroy them. You may burn my books and the books of the greatest minds in Europe, but the ideas within them will have been spread through countless channels and will continue to inspire other minds.” Novelists Sherwood Anderson, Faith Baldwin, Erwin Cobb, and Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis all joined forces to publicly protest the book burnings. They reminded everyone of Heinrich Heine’s prophetic observation from the 19th century: “Where one burns books, one will soon burn people.”

A Sign of the Ultimate GoalAfter the bonfires, 100,000 people marched in New York City to protest Nazi policies. Similar demonstrations occurred in Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis. While German newspapers triumphantly reported that Germany was purging itself of Jews and others considered politically or artistically suspect, the American media responded with shock. N called it “a holocaust of books;” T a “bibliocaust.” Yet the indignation was more rhetoric than true outrage. NColumnist Walter Lippmann was one of the few journalists to recognize the true implications of the Nazis’ book burnings. He wrote that these acts symbolized “the moral and intellectual character of the Nazi regime.” He noted that these bonfires were not the work of schoolboys or mobs, but rather of the German government. He warned that the ominous symbolism of these bonfires indicated that the government meant to teach its people that their salvation lay in violence.