Book burning 1933: Nazis set thoughts ablaze

[lgillis]

90 years ago today, the Nazis launched the campaign "Against the Un-German Spirit. Thousands of books, mainly by Jewish authors but also by other politically disagreeable writers, are banned and publicly burned.

May 10, 1933: In numerous German university towns, the Nazis cart thousands of books from public and private libraries and burn them in public squares. They are works by well-known authors such as Erich Kästner, Kurt Tucholsky, Carl von Ossietzky and Heinrich Mann, including many Jewish writers. In total, books by more than 300 philosophers, scientists, poets, novelists and political authors are affected - a "Holocaust of Books," as the American illustrated magazine "Newsweek" wrote at the time.

The book burnings on May 10 involved not only ordinary citizens but also students and university rectors and professors. They gather at Berlin's Opernplatz (today's Bebelplatz), at Wilhelmsplatz in Kiel, at Greifswald's Marktplatz, at the Bismarck Column in Hanover and in other university towns. In Hamburg, the burning does not take place until May 15 at Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer due to heavy rain. The actions continue into June, accompanied by so-called fire slogans in which one shouter after the other denigrates individual authors.

In Berlin on May 10, Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels himself is present and declares the "age of an exaggerated Jewish intellectualism" to be over. Goebbels, who studied German and wrote his doctoral thesis under a Jewish professor, thus clears the way for the destruction of hundreds of "un-German" literary works. Far more than 20,000 books were collected in Berlin alone during the book-burning campaigns.

With Erich Kästner, one of the affected authors also ventures to the pyres: "I stood wedged between students in SA uniforms in front of the university, watched our books fly into the twitching flames and listened to the sloppy tirades of the little wily liar. Funeral weather hung over the city. (...) It was disgusting."

The book burnings are a first triumph for the policy of "Gleichschaltung" and suppression of free opinion. At the same time, they are the culmination of the campaign "Against the Un-German Spirit" with which the German Student Body, dominated by the Nazi Student League, began to persecute Jewish and politically disfavored writers in March 1933 - many of these authors shape our image of the literature of the Weimar Republic today.

Heinrich Heine, whose writings were also banned by the National Socialists, put a gloomy prophecy into the mouth of his protagonist Hassan as early as 1820 in the tragedy play "Almansor": "That was only a prelude. Where you burn books, you end up burning people." These words were to come true in Germany a few years after 1933.

(https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/chronolog ... nung2.html)

[thinkaboutit2]

Ctrl+F Hirschfeld
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Ever wonder why articles such as these generally brush over which books they were burning? Why do they almost never mention Hirschfeld? It's almost as if these "articles" are nothing but propaganda and have very little actual value.

Let me tell you a bit about Magnus Hirschfeld, because apparently they never mention him when they talk about these nazi book burnings. Magnus Hirschfeld was a pioneer of his time. He created the privately funded non-profit institute for sexual sciences, the first in the world. He was also part of a Scientific-Humanitarian Committee which campaigned on progressive and rational grounds for LGBT rights and tolerance but also emancipation and other concepts.

Magnus Hirschfeld was the one that coined the term 'transsexual' in a 1923 essay, Die Intersexuelle Konstitution. On top of this, one of the first sex reassignment surgeries was practiced at his institute. Many of the institute's books and archives were burned by the nazis.

Many blame the nazi's for singlehandedly pushing back sexual sciences many decades and to be quite frank, I'm glad the nazi's did.

I believe that ideas such as his are what have caused social and societal degredation in the past few decades. Ask yourself this, have things improved over the past decades or have they gone to complete shit from these rediscovered ideologies, many which existed in Weimar Germany at the time? In many respects, I believe it has. The western world is following the path of the Weimar Republic, and I have the feeling the next Hitler is soon due.

There is only so much bullshit normal people can take.

Remember that Hitler was voted into power.