The great political and social turmoil during the Nazi Regime as well as in the Mccarythist era is what inspired Bradbury’s writing of Fahrenheit 451. Following World War 2, there was a fear of communism that spread through America. In the early 1950s, there was a belief that a small group of Russian Soviet’s had infiltrated America, leading to a reckless hunt of anyone with of left of centre political views or anyone who associated with such a person. This included accusing those who had art hanging on their walls, had participated in protests, or had a multiracial group of friends. There was a threat of book burning and everyone lived afraid of their shadows. “I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action,” says Bradbury. 

Before this, something similar happened in World War 2. The Germans believed themselves to be the superior race and wanted to cleanse themselves of other cultures. The Nazi Germans wanted to eliminate foreign influence and hence purify German culture.  Students and professors would meet to discuss which categories of books to burn, and then have huge bonfires where they would burn such books. They would burn “un-German literature”, and in these book burnings, 80,000-90,000 volumes were burnt. Books are a crucial form of documentation of ideas and our past, this was seen to be confiscation of culture and history for some. Literature is a medium that allows the spread of ideas and knowledge. However, this is dangerous for a regime which aims to limit the spread of new ideas, and don’t want the spread of knowledge of anything but what they want to tell. Bradbury commented on the Nazi book burnings and how it inspired him to write Farhenheit 451, saying “The reason why I wrote Fahrenheit is that I am a library person and I am in danger of someday writing something that people might not like and they might burn.”