Book Burnings in Nazi Germany

Pre-World War Two, in 1933 Germany, a precedent for information control and censorship was committed with the action against the un-German spirit took place nationwide, as the Nazi propaganda machine swung full force into its cultural cleansing of Germany. The works of intellectuals and free thinkers threatened the control the party had over Germany and they needed to be squashed out. The Nazi party had a very limited narrow sight of what the world should be, and discriminated aggressively against people that didn’t fit their superior race mould.

fwdyd 2007, Nazi Book Burning, 13 July, viewed 27 May 2012 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4_j4c7Bop0>.

With soldiers and students collecting material deemed not worthy of the idealistic Nazi Germany to be destroyed in a firey blaze in the streets. The biggest bonfire was that of Bebelplatz, where on the night of May 10th soldiers marched with torches and lit up over 20,000 books. Thus with it, burning the intellectual rights and freedoms of their people. In it’s place today, there is a memorial of what was loss and a reminder for freedom of the future, stating eloquently: Wherever books are burnt, men will eventually be burnt.

In response to these burning two libraries were erected, they the German Freedom Library in France and the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books at the Brooklyn Jewish Center in New York. They were created to preserve the information during such radical change that the Nazi party were happy to eradicate such information. This way the people would have the freedom to enjoy, philosophise and learn from materials that were written by some of the most interesting and intelligent people on the planet.

Search Strategy:
I searched for articles on EBSCOHost that contained information on Nazi books burnings and then used the book that I had discovered in the previous post that had plenty of useful information that I could still squeeze from it. I then decided to take to Youtube and search for a short film that could share on the blog depicting footage from the 1933 book burnings. In which I searched for ‘Nazi Book burnings 1933’.

References:
Fishburn, M. 2008, Burning Books, Palgrave Macmillan, EBL Ebook Library, viewed 27 May 2012.

Zebrowski, Marianne 2000, ‘Knowledge up in flames’, Faces, vol. 16, no. 7, p. 26,  Abstracts in Social Gerontology, EBSCOhost, viewed 27 May 2012

Ritchie, J.M. 1988, ‘The Nazi Book Burning’, Modern Language Review, vol. 83, no. 3, p. 17,  Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 27 May 2012

Von Merveldt, Nikola 2007, ‘Books Cannot Be Killed by Fire: The German Freedom Library and the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books as Agents of Cultural Memory.’, Library Trends, vol. 55, no. 3, p. 523-535,  Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 27 May 2012