Flames of Nazi Oblivion

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Shannon McElyea <Shannon () DeepNines com>
Reply-To: Shannon () DeepNines com
Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 17:56:30 -0700
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Flames of Nazi Oblivion



 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/10/opinion/10SAT3.html?th
Flames of Nazi Oblivion
eventy years ago today, a series of conflagrations lit up the night in a
number of German cities. By the standard of the Reichstag fire earlier that
year or the firestorms to come in the years ahead, these fires were
unimpressive. But each was surrounded by a sizable crowd — many people there
students and most of them giddy with ideological fervor — that fed the
flames with piles of books. The aim was to cleanse Germany of un-German
literature, "Jewish intellectualism" and works by Nazi enemies. Students had
cleared their own shelves and the shelves of libraries of books by a list of
authors that would make a respectable library in itself. The events of that
day and the American response to it are the subject of a new exhibition
called "Fighting the Fires of Hate" at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington.

The fires of May 10, 1933, were a cultural atrocity that presaged the human
atrocities that soon followed. The voice of Joseph Goebbels, speaking at the
Berlin book-burning, rattles through the exhibition space. The voice, the
fires, the sight of books being flung through the night, their pages torn
away as they streak toward the flames — all of this catches our eye and our
imagination, and strikes our conscience, too, since we pride ourselves on
our response to the Nazis.

To get to the last, most violent stage of censorship, when works of Heinrich
Heine, Bertolt Brecht, Sigmund Freud and Erich Maria Remarque go up in
flames alongside those of Marc Chagall, H. G. Wells and Ernest Hemingway,
you have to begin with the simple listing of tainted books. Like other parts
of the Holocaust museum — now marking its 10th anniversary — "Fighting the
Fires of Hate" puts a face on those lists of victims by introducing viewers
to the authors, one by one, whose books were burned.

It is a grim tally. For some writers, especially the English and Americans,
the fires made little practical difference. But for others it meant the
beginning of an exile that too often ended in suicide or murder. The first
enemies of a totalitarian regime are always its most articulate enemies. The
sight of those fires of 70 years ago and those faces livid with conviction
should remind us that censorship, even when no books are being torched, is
in its very nature a violence against the essential freedoms of thought and
expression.


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