A reflection on Book Burnings and the History of Censorship

Through the past few posts I have learnt different ways of searching through various databases and search engines to find the information I needed. Sadly I found that the library catalogue of physical books almost redundant, as access to information on the subject via ejournals, ebooks and articles on the web to be far more accessible and abundant than physical books on the subjects. Which pretty much states that we as librarian technicians need to be able to search for digital sources just as readily and easily as we able to search our catalogue of physical items. Because if we are to narrow our sights to that of just physical content, we are not fully enabling the user to access to all the information that they have available. I think, though, that google should be a last resort, and that we should steer users into using published material in ejournals and ebooks. Although I stated my preference for Wikipedia to be all inclusive in the last post, I don’t not feel it is entirely reliable as it a user based product whose information should be taken with a grain of salt and should be only the starting pointing for locating information.

As I searched through electronic resources I came across some creative material that had been inspired by book burnings that I thought I’d share in my reflective post, as these are other people’s creative reflections of their thoughts on book burning.

Appia, Dominique 1948 '  Entre les Trous de la Memoire' [image], Miserable Bliss, viewed 28 May 2012, < http://miserablebliss.ca/blog/wp-content/entre_les_trous_de_la_memoire.jpg>

I came across numerous artists that have constructed artworks based on book burnings, but there were two that struck a chord with me, as they both reflected how burning can affect the human condition. Entre les Trous de la Memoire, is a painting by Dominique Appia of a young girl burning books while pieces of herself are missing. The painting reflects on the idea of burning bridges, and the act of burning books is much like the way Nazi Germany and Qin Shi Huang burnt books to eradicate the past so there is only the present and the future that now exists and they left their people with large cultural black holes of missing information. More recently an artist by the name of Joe Moorman created a work simply titled Book Burning  to reflect on the Christian book burnings that happened on the streets in the USA. It seems to invoke the plaque in Bebelplatz stating “Wherever books are burnt, men will eventually be burnt.” But not only that, but the skeletons themselves seem like the reapers of books.

Moorman, Joe 'Book Burning' [image], Riverson Fine Art, viewed 28 May 2012, < http://www.riversonfineart.com/images/book_burning.jpg>

In 1953, Ray Bradbury wrote the book Fahrenheit 451, which depicts a bleak future where all the books in the United States are being burnt, much in the same way the Nazi’s did in 1933. But, as Ray Bradbury has stated, the novel was more about how TV made books redundant, but there is no denying how strong the ties are between the events in Nazi Germany to that of the book. Where the “Firemen” were there to destroy information of the past. Check out the trailer for the 1966 movie adaption below:

DIOTD2008 2008, Fahrenheit 451 1966, 19 February, viewed 28 May 2012, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cQ-yGCyjyM>.

References:
Bradbury, Ray 1991, Fahrenheit 451, Del Ray, New York.

MisterMaxHeadroom 2008, Fahrenheit 451, 20 August, viewed 28 May 2012, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9n98SXNGl8>.

Pober Stacey 1992, ‘Farenheit 451’, The Library Journal, July, vol. 117, p. 146, Academic Onefile, Gale Cengage, viewed 28 May 2012.

Domique Appia, Dominique Appia, viewed 28 May 2012, <http://www.appia-d.ch/>

"Book Burning" contemporary figurative painting by Joe Moorman at Riverson Fine Art, Revision Fine Art, viewed 28 May 2012, < http://www.riversonfineart.com/painting_book_burning.htm>

Deletionism

With the new age of digital access media comes new ways for information to exist, allowing it to be accessed from anyone at anytime, anywhere. While services such as Wikipedia serve as platforms to allow people to share information as they choose, it has in the last decade become a battleground for two opposing forces about how the information should be shared and what is and isn’t worthy of being an article on Wikipedia.

On one side of the fence, we have the inclusionists, who are trying to include as much information as possible onto the user based encyclopaedia. This includes little stars to the most popular, articles on the most seemingly irrelevant to the most relevant.  They are the fighters for free and all inclusive information.

On the other side we have the deletionists, who are fighting for the site to be more exclusive and of higher more pertinent knowledge. They want it to more akin to published material to minimise excess and have only quality beefy articles.

With emotions running high with their strong beliefs they both have extremists views of each other where the deletionists think the inclusionists will include everything until every person and their pet in the world has a page dedicated to them. Where the inclusionists consider deletionists will delete everything down until it just has articles about God and Britney Spears.

Although I understand the fears and wants of the deletionists, I think they are fighting the wrong fight, Wikipedia is not a published based source, it’s a free user based source, it shouldn’t be censored. Because what information is important? It’s information that is needed by someone. If a person needs information on a certain small time actor, information about the Christian Church wouldn’t necessarily be important, but that small time actor will be very important.

This mentality reaches out beyond Wikipedia, let us consider ebooks. If a publisher or database site decides that a book is no longer worthy of keeping anymore they can delete from existence and stop any further people from accessing the material. This will stop the flow of information and items can slip through the cracks into obscurity or be almost like they never existed in the first place. Therefore people with access to this information can filter and censor what is seen by its viewers. All at the touch of the button...

Search Strategy:
Due to the heavy involvement of Wikipedia on this subject, I thought it was imperative that I got onto Wikipedia and see what it said about deletionism. So I searched for it on the wikipedia website, which felt like a big no-no for an academic study task but I did it regardless, and found a very neutral article on the battle between inclusionists and deletionists. I then searched for outside sources on the subject, a lot of sources I located were of blogs on either side of the fence yelling at each other over who is in the right and calling the other a moron. I think this is what you need to look at though, as it is still an ongoing battle between the two mentalities and both sides have their voices to be read. But you should approach it with an unbiased eye.

David, Peter 2010, ‘Wiki wha? Doing battle with the Deletionists’, Comic Buyer’s Guide, March, p. 82, General Onefile, Gale Cengage, viewed 28 May 2012.

Johnson, Bobby 2009, ‘Wikipedia reaches its limits’, The Hindu (English), 13 August, Academic Onefile, Gale Cengage, viewed 28 May 2012.

Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia 2012, Wikipedia, viewed 28 May 2012, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia>.

Brockmeier, Joe 2012, Is Wikipedia's "Deletionism" Out of Control?, Ocstatic, viewed 28 May 2012, <http://ostatic.com/blog/is-wikipedias-deletionism-out-of-control>.

Bray, Tim 2012, Deletionist Morons, Ongoing, viewed 28 May 2012, <http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/15/Deletionist-Morons>.

Cairo's Scientific Complex Library

In Cairo, at the end of last year, aggressive protests continued against the ruling military government in an attempt to get them to step down and allow the people to have a civilian based democratic government. The protests had raged for four days before there was an attack that Cairo's Egyptian Scientific Complex was caught in the crossfire. With the death toll already being about 14 people, there had already been a lot of tragedy. The military using the rooves of buildings to gain a high advantage protestors over the protestors, but the enraged citizens still threw stones and firebombs up at the soldiers.

Omar, Mohamed 2011, ‘Insitute in Flames’ [image], in Pictures: Fire Destroys "Temple of Knowledge" in Egypt, National Geographic, viewed 28 May 2012, < http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/459/cache/cairo-institute-library-burns-egypt-outside_45994_600x450.jpg>.

This is how the incident occurred, and thus burning down the Temple of Knowledge and many of the 192,000 materials the library held inside. Most of these items were very highly valuable, both in financial and cultural terms. With materials being of historical document formats, maps and documental photography.  Firemen spent hours putting out the fire, but consequently the water from their hoses caused even more damage to the fragile materials inside. The next day after the burning volunteers garbed in lab coats and gloves, assisted in trying to recover as many of the materials as possible and loaded them onto trucks for repairs. Luckily, some items that were fully destroyed, like the original map of Ethopia, have other copies in other libraries and some items are digitised for people to have full access too.

GHSRMENA 2011, Egypt - 20111217 - Cairo - Youth saves heritage books of scientific complex, delivered them to army, 18 December, viewed 28 May 2012 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5ESpXuO9Zs>.

Even though the building was supposedly caught in the crossfire and thus not a direct act of book burning, the event caused a lot of cultural and historical damage, some of which will not be able to be recovered, which is a tragedy for cultural conservation and for the future learning of people.

Search Strategy:
Due to the recent nature of the event, there were no books on the matter, and as far as I could find, there were no articles on EBSCOhost, so I resorted to using Google and only using material that I felt noteworthy of citing. So I mostly stuck to newspaper and magazine sites that were somewhat known and reputable. I originally came across the story when randomly googling recent book burnings, and decided it was interesting enough to follow through as the fire was involved with a riot simultaneously and also involved the burning of a library complex.

References:
‘Egypt riots threaten cultural sites as Cairo library goes up in flame’ 2011, Haaretz, 19 December, viewed 28 May 2012, <http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/egypt-riots-threaten-cultural-sites-as-cairo-library-goes-up-in-flame-1.402408>.

‘Pictures: Fire Destroys "Temple of Knowledge" in Egypt’ 2011, National Geographic, 20 December, viewed 28 May 2012, <http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/12/pictures/111220-egypt-cairo-protests-fire-scientific-complex-world-science/>.

Batrawy, Aya 2011, ‘Thousands of rare documents burned in Egypt clash’ MSNBC, 19 December, viewed 28 May 2012 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45727231/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/thousands-rare-documents-burned-egypt-clash/#.T8IgptUthS0>.

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

Research Brief

For my research of Book Burnings and the History of Censorship, I plan to research, recap and reflect on some major book burning events throughout history and comment on how they play a major role in censorship. From the most notoriously known historical burnings, such as the Nazi book burnings, to the more recent incident in Cairo and the emergence of a new form of book burnings, Deletionism.

In the pursuit of completing these blog posts I will conduct research using a variety of sources available from the Swinburne University Libraries resources. Searching throughout the large collection of databases to find relevant journals, articles, books, and any other media that is available for me on the subject. I shall also conduct online research consisting of websites and ebooks that I shall look into and deem worthy before citing. This shall allow me to gain access to the widest possible net of information available at my convenience. With each blog post I intend to post something visual to help give the blog a little more flare for the reader. Be it a copyright free picture, or footage from youtube.

My blog will be split into the following categories:

• Post 1: Research Brief

• Post 2: An Introduction to the History of Book Burnings and Censorship: I shall conduct general research of book burnings and related censorship throughout History for this post. Lightly touching on some of the more intriguing yet disappointing events that had occurred and some of the cost involved.

• Post 3: Book Burnings in Nazi Germany: I shall delve deeper into one of the most infamous book burning events in recorded history and then reflect on my findings.

• Post 4: Cairo's Scientific Complex Library: I shall research into a recent book burning event that was involved with political unrest and how it affected the lives in Cairo.

• Post 5: Deletionism: I shall discuss a new form of 'book burning' that emerged with the digital age, which is known as deletionism.

• Post 6: A reflection on Book Burnings and the History of Censorship: I will sum up my thoughts on the subject with the information I have accumulated. I will also make nods at generic articles and blogs of other peoples thoughts on book burnings and their relationship to censorship.