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  • Books represent humanity at its best and its worst.

  • To burn books is simply a fundamental repression of ideas.

  • I mean, what can a book do? And why is it so dangerous

  • that it needs to be

  • physically

  • annihilated?

  • In 1933,

  • the National Socialist German Workers Party, called the Nazis for short,

  • came to power in Germany and established a

  • dictatorship under the leadership of

  • Adolf Hitler.

  • The Nazis intended

  • to re-arm Germany

  • and to reorganize the German state

  • on the principle

  • that the German

  • ethnic group or race was superior to all others in Europe.

  • They suppressed all dissent

  • within Germany,

  • making it a crime to criticize the regime.

  • The newly established Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment set up

  • various chambers to control

  • specific aspects of German culture such as art,

  • literature,

  • theater,

  • film,

  • music,

  • virtually all forms of entertainment and

  • all forms of dissemination of news.

  • In 1933,

  • in April, Nazi German students decided to

  • organize a nationwide

  • book burning

  • program to eliminate foreign influence, to purify German culture as they saw it.

  • So you have committees of students meeting with professors together

  • deciding what categories of books in these university libraries

  • would count as un-German. They didn't see themselves as suppressing culture. They saw

  • themselves as advancing Aryan German culture.

  • I remember very distinctly

  • a conversation between my parents

  • and some friends

  • who were all shocked that a nation like the Germans,

  • an educated, highly intelligent nation, would burn books.

  • Books never hurt anybody.

  • The event that the students planned occurred on May 10,

  • 1933.

  • In each

  • German university city,

  • thirty-four of them in all,

  • thousands of people gathered together at a public place in which books that had

  • been confiscated either by the students themselves or by Nazi Party officials,

  • often with the help of police, were brought and dumped in a pile. Student

  • leaders exhorted their followers and the listening crowds to swear an oath by

  • the fire,

  • to destroy and combat subversive and un-German

  • literature.

  • "For the national treason against our soldiers in World War I,

  • we're burning Hemingway's books." --Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister

  • himself spoke at the book

  • burning in Berlin.

  • It is amazing to me

  • the variety of

  • books

  • that was

  • burned on that night and thereafter. -Among the authors whose books

  • were burned

  • were Ernest Hemingway...both Mann brothers, Thomas and Heinrich... --There's the German

  • writer,

  • Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote

  • the famous book All Quiet on the Western Front...

  • Helen Keller...

  • Jack London, the American nature writer... There's very little that unites all of these

  • books really except that they were all considered dangerous by the Nazis.

  • A grand total of the number of volumes, perhaps best estimates

  • would be between eighty or ninety thousand volumes. For weeks afterwards,

  • books were confiscated from libraries,

  • from bookshops, and from private collections.

  • In 1939,

  • the Nazi regime initiated what became the Second World War.

  • During the course of this war,

  • the Nazis begin to implement their

  • population policy,

  • a priority element of which was the annihilation of six million Jews on the

  • European continent

  • in a

  • mass murder, a genocide that we

  • now call the Holocaust.

  • I was about 11

  • when i read the diary of Anne Frank. And it was translated into Persian.

  • Reading about Anne Frank and millions of other Iranians reading Anne Frank,

  • they discover

  • that they are that little girl. And that what happened to that little

  • girl was a supreme act of injustice.

  • And so they connect to her in away that no political

  • sermon,

  • or propaganda could affect. The

  • first thing every

  • totalitarian regime does, along with confiscation

  • and mutilation of reality, is confiscation of history and

  • confiscation of culture. I think they all happen,

  • almost simultaneously.

  • And they surely happened in my experience when I was living in Iran.

  • For me it's both

  • heartbreaking and,

  • quote unquote, a sort of badge of honor

  • that my book is not allowed to be published in Iran. It has been

  • translated into thirty-five languages and not in Persian.

  • Really all literature is dangerous to a regime that

  • fears the free flow of ideas.

  • Because the literature in its most fundamental way is meant to

  • forge connections among human beings. --Because you don't know where it takes you.

  • Knowledge is always unpredictable,

  • there is always a risk. It is like Alice jumping down that hole, running

  • after that white rabbit, not knowing where she goes.

  • And for tyrants, control is the main thing. They don't like this

  • unpredictability,

  • they don't want the citizens

  • to connect to the unknown parts of themselves, of their past, and to connect

  • to the world. --For a totalitarian regime this is perhaps the most

  • dangerous thing.

  • Because these regimes are predicated on the idea

  • that the people within them will resign themselves

  • the thinking that this is all there is. And that there aren't any other options.

  • I think the shame

  • is ours,

  • is everyone's. We all

  • have to think

  • that as humans we share the best and worst,

  • and that as human beings what happened then

  • can happen again. --How serious those warning signs were taken

  • is exemplified by my mother,

  • who, when I asked her if we had to worry about a guy like Hitler,

  • she said, "No.

  • We are living in a democracy.

  • We have the protection of the police. Nobody's going to hurt us."

  • So talk about warning signs, there were plenty of them.

  • Did w Did we take them seriously?

  • My family didn't. Never believed

  • that Germans would stoop so low

  • that they would implement the threats

  • which one fanatic uttered...

  • And so, our

  • own life

  • went from bad to worse

  • and it culminated in July of 1942,

  • when we were arrested

  • and sent to a concentration camp.

  • To make this clear,

  • it was a life without hope.

  • The only thing that they cannot

  • put in jail, or

  • prevent from physically

  • leaving, is your mind, is your imagination. That cannot be captured.

  • But the idea

  • of freedom

  • should be kept alive, even if it's between two people or three people. Talk

  • about it,

  • think about it, live about it, and hope about it.

Books represent humanity at its best and its worst.

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納粹焚書 (Nazi Book Burning)

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    阿多賓 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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