Bonfire of the Sanities Exhibit Examines How Nazis Tried to Repress Ideas With Book Burnings by Gary Tischler Helen Keller, Ernest Hemingway, Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Bertolt Brecht, Vicki Baum, Jack London, John Reed, Erich Maria Remarque: These names constitute a remarkable and unlikely literary salon, but they share a rather unique common historyóor rather their works do. Their books were part of a fiery orgy on May 10, 1933, when German university students and officials from the newly installed government of Adolf Hitler staged massive book-burning rallies across Germany, consigning to the flames books they deemed decadent and un-German. ìFighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings,î a new exhibition at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, documents not only the dramatic events surrounding the book burnings, but U.S. reaction to the burnings and how they have resonated over the years as a symbol of repression and censorship. The Nazis had assumed power in January 1933. The book burnings, which occurred in cities all across Germany six years be fore the start of World War II, were staged events that included raids on private, commercial and public libraries, confiscation of proscribed books, and torch light parades that presaged much bigger showcases of Nazi mythology in Nuremberg. The exhibition at the Holocaust Museum includes film clips of books being thrown on fiery pyres and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in a harsh, biting tirade, inveighing against Jews and predicting that ìout of these ashes, the phoenix of a new spirit will arise.î In the background, bands played and students sang and swore ìfire oaths.î In the end, the works of 576 authors were proscribed in Germany, among them not only Keller and Hemingway but many others, including Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann and his brother Heinrich Mann, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Most of the authors were either German or Jewish or both, but they also included various ìdecadentî foreign writers from the United States and Russia. Henceforth, public libraries would be, according to Goebbels, ìArsenals of the German spirit.î For many Americans, particularly intellectuals and members of the media, the burnings resonated sharply and vividly because they were seen as a direct attack on a core American value: freedom of speech. Writers and reporters, political cartoonists, artists and others joined in protest. If some observers dismissed the fires as ìstudent pranks,î others saw things more clearly. Newsweek, for example, used the term ìa holocaust of booksî and Time called it a ìbibliocaust.î Author Keller was outraged: ìHistory,î she wrote in an open letter to German students, ìhas taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed themÖ. I deplore the injustice and unwisdom of passing on to unborn generations the stigma of your deeds.î The response in the United States seemed immediate and lasting. During World War II, the war against Nazi Germany was often presented as a war of values. For many Americans, book burning became a symbol that transcended Nazism, the war and the Holocaust: It was the symbol of oppression, suppression of ideas, thought control, censorship and intolerance. Time and again, as the exhibition shows in film clips, posters, photographs and quotes, the 1933 book burnings would be invoked as a cry against Nazi Germany in the United States, and nothing in the events leading up to World War II had such an impact on the American imagination and its latent capacity for moral outrage. The United States of course didnít lack for would-be and actual book burners over the years, beginning with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who produced a list of subversive books he wanted banned from libraries, and only recently, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, a local church staged a symbolic bonfire in which they burned Harry Potter books, not for their pedestrian writing but for what it saw as a celebration of witchcraft. However, the Nazi book-burning legacy will always be different. The book bonfires became a symbol that would be invoked throughout subsequent periods of U.S. history. One of the classic images from World War II is Norman Rockwellís series of paintings titled ìFour Freedomsîóchief among them being freedom of speech. ìBooks are weapons in the war of ideas,î proclaimed one U.S. poster, and the Nazis, years before World War II began, had thrown away the ballgame by providing the world with a perfect symbol to be turned against them. ìFighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burningsî runs through Oct. 13 at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW. For more information, please call (202) 488-0400 or visit www.ushmm.org. Gary Tischler is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.