11/8/2023 0 Comments Inside burn book ideasThe poet, philosopher and political theorist John Milton, whose books were publicly burned in England and France, gives perhaps the best explanation of why authorities down the centuries have seen danger in certain books. (Jones, who has received death threats, may have taken to carrying a gun, but no less a figure than Barack Obama warned yesterday of the consequences the pastor's act may have had for US servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan.) If Pastor Terry Jones, leader of the small but now extremely well-known Dove World Outreach Centre in Gainesville, Florida, who planned to burn 200 copies of the Qur'an despite near-universal condemnation, didn't know it before, he certainly does now. Goebbels, of course, was by no means the first to recognise the symbolism: authorities around the world, both secular and religious, have known since the Chinese Qin dynasty in 200BC that book-burning is an act of peculiar potency. A book, plainly, is something more than ink and paper, and burning one (or many) means something more than destroying it by any other means. It goes beyond the censoring of beliefs and ideas. ![]() There's something uniquely symbolic about the burning of books. Also among the authors whose books were burned that night was the great 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine, who barely a century earlier, in 1821, had written in his play Almansor the words: " Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen" – "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people." The volumes consigned to the flames in Berlin, and more than 30 other university towns around the country on that and following nights, included works by more than 75 German and foreign authors, among them (to cite but a few) Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Lenin, Jack London, Heinrich, Klaus and Thomas Mann, Ludwig Marcuse, Karl Marx, John Dos Passos, Arthur Schnitzler, Leon Trotsky, HG Wells, Émile Zola and Stefan Zweig. From this wreckage the phoenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise." You do well, in this midnight hour, to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. "The future German man," the Reichsminister declared in a speech, "will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. ![]() The climax of a month-long nationwide campaign, this best-known of literary bonfires was intended as both a purge and a purification of the true German spirit, supposedly weakened and corrupted by un-German ideas and intellectualism. Amid much joyous singing, band-playing and chanting of oaths and incantations, they watched soldiers and police from the SS, brownshirted members of the paramilitary SA, and impassioned youths from the German Student Association and Hitler Youth Movement burn, at the behest of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, upwards of 25,000 books decreed to be "un-German". On the night of, a crowd of some 40,000 people gathered in the Opernplatz – now the Bebelplatz – in the Mitte district of Berlin.
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