What was book burning

Today, with new technological advances offered by the Internet, the possibility of digitizing written documents seems to offer books a new immortality. But not so fast, Knuth says. This is a problem archivists at the Smithsonian Institution regularly tackle, including electronic records archivist Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig. Schmitz Fuhrig says one of the biggest challenges now is storage space.

Sometimes doing so is counter to the beliefs of whoever happens to be in power. Just consider that under President George W. Or look at the scientific research documents that were locked away or destroyed under the Stephen Harper government in Canada in , which had a chilling effect on the topics that could be researched and the studies that were published.

Technology has undoubtedly changed the way we share and save information, but Knuth argues that the core motivations for book burning, in whatever form the act takes, remain the same: prioritizing one type of information over another.

According to Matthew Fishburn, author of Burning Books , this could be why it took the rest of the world so long to realize what the Nazis were actually up to and capable of when they began their campaigns of book burning just a century later.

Books that were considered subversive or representative of ideologies opposing Nazism were the most targeted, including works by Jewish and leftist writers such as Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud and Upton Sinclair. The first books burned were by Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky.

The DSt contacted an official from the Propaganda Ministry to request support for their campaign, and book burnings became highly publicized events that were broadcast on live radio, along with speeches and songs. When complicit German students ran out of books to burn in their own libraries, they would turn to independent bookstores.

Bradbury had said that he wrote Fahrenheit because of his concerns regarding book burning during the McCarthy era. Both are examples of ignorance and intolerance, which have been at the root of most book burnings throughout history. Whether it happens on a small or large scale, book burning and the symbolic destruction of ideas is one unfortunate way to get attention, and often send messages of intolerance, hate, and even violence. Did you find this post helpful?

Let us know in the comments below! Also burned were works of international best-selling author Erich Maria Remarque. Nazi ideologues vilified Remarque's unflinching description of war, All Quiet on the Western Front , as "a literary betrayal of the soldiers of the World War. Other writers included on the blacklists were American authors Jack London , Theodore Dreiser , and Helen Keller , whose belief in social justice encouraged her to champion the disabled, pacifism, improved conditions for industrial workers, and women's voting rights.

Jewish authors numbered among the writers whose works were burned, among them some of the most famous contemporary writers of the day, such as Franz Werfel , Max Brod , and Stefan Zweig. Not all book burnings took place on May 10, as the German Student Association had planned.

Some were postponed a few days because of rain. Others, based on local chapter preference, took place on June 21, the summer solstice, a traditional date for bonfire celebrations in Germany.

Nonetheless, in 34 university towns across Germany the May 10th "Action against the Un-German Spirit" was a success, receiving widespread newspaper coverage.

In some cities, notably Berlin, radio broadcasts brought the speeches, songs, and ceremonial chants "live" to countless German listeners.

The promotion of "Aryan" culture and the suppression of other forms of artistic production was yet another Nazi effort to "purify" Germany. 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.

We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. Also, some of the characters in her stories and novels sometimes use the N-word.

But a charge of racism is a death sentence in the current literary scene. This charge is also being leveled at other white Southern writers who lived during the segregation era, including one of the greatest novelists in American literature, William Faulkner , who is recorded saying that he supported separation of the races.

Other American classics have already been largely canceled for their depictions of race. Perhaps the greatest American novel, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, has been censored and expelled from the curriculum because its characters use the N-word and because the author reproduces black dialects. Note too the reductionism. Lewis observed that every age has its blind spots. Reading works from the past can not only make us aware of mistakes from the past, it can also make us realize that we have blind spots of our own.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we.