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Nazi Book Burning

Filed with 60.13.2 World War II · Related: 60.23 History · 60.13 Wars

Book Burning | Holocaust Encyclopedia

  • Which Authors and Works were Targeted?
    Among the authors whose books student leaders burned that night were well-known socialists such as Bertolt Brecht and August Bebel; the founder of the concept of communism, Karl Marx; critical “bourgeois” writers like the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler; and “corrupting foreign influences,” among them American author Ernest Hemingway.
    The fires also consumed several writings of the 1929 Nobel Prize-winning German author Thomas Mann, whose support of the Weimar Republic and critique of fascism raised Nazi ire. 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.” Works by early German literary critics of the Nazi regime were also burned, such as those of Erich Kästner, Heinrich Mann, and Ernst Gläser.
    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.
    Also among those works burned were the writings of beloved nineteenth-century German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who wrote in his 1820–1821 play Almansor the famous admonition, “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen”: “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”

Nazi book burnings - Wikipedia