On this day in 1933, university students across Germany burned over 25,000 books deemed ‘un-German’ in a chilling display of state-sanctioned intolerance. Jewish writers were especially targeted – among them Lion Feuchtwanger, Sigmund Freud, and Stefan Zweig – alongside political critics and international voices such as Helen Keller.
The burnings, cheered on by Joseph Goebbels in Berlin’s Opera Square, marked the symbolic beginning of a campaign to erase Jewish and dissident thought from German cultural life. As Heinrich Heine, himself a Jewish writer, warned in 1821: ‘Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people’.
Today, we remember the power of words – and the dangers of silencing them.
Image: ‘Bücherverbrennung’ by Elk Eber, depicted in Nazi Book Burning and the American Response, by Guy Stern (article in the book Zenzur und Kultur, by John A. McCarthy and Werner von der Ohe, 1995). https://links.cjh.org/primo/lbi/CJH_ALEPH000182499
