BOOK BURNINGS, Review

[appalachiablue]

Authoritarian dictators and totalitarian regimes target the free flow of ideas and information and dissent in literature, art, history and culture. Censorship and suppression has happened before, and it can happen again.

"Where books are burned, in the end people will also be burned." ~ Heinrich Heine, German poet, 1821.

On May 10, 1933, German students under the Nazi regime burned tens of thousands of books nationwide. These book burnings marked the beginning of a period of extensive censorship and control of culture in Adolf Hitler's escalating reign of terror. In this short film, a Holocaust survivor, an Iranian author, an American literary critic, and two Museum historians discuss the Nazi book burnings and why totalitarian regimes often target culture, particularly literature.

Censorship, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship



The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union (the DSt') to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism as well as instilling fear into people around. These included books written by Jewish, pacifist, religious, liberal, anarchist, socialist, communist, and those who spoke out about gender and sexuality among others. The first books burned were those of Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky..

Not only German-speaking authors were burned, but also French authors like Henri Barbusse, André Gide, Victor Hugo and Romain Rolland; American writers such as John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Jack London and Upton Sinclair; as well as English authors Joseph Conrad, Radclyffe Hall, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence and H. G. Wells; Irish writers James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; and Russian authors including Isaac Babel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Maxim Gorki, Vladimir Lenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Leo Tolstoy, and Leon Trotsky...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_book_burnings

[PJMcK]

1. As Doctor Jones (Sean Connery) said...

... Maybe you should try reading a book instead of burning them. (paraphrased and a wink)

[Igel]

2. Book burnings are just publicity for book bannings.

All it takes for that is an sense of overweening intolerance, which usually is masked as "protecting" some vulnerable group or other.

[appalachiablue]

3. Yes, heightened publicity with drama for effect..