Where books are burned, in the end, people will be burned.” (Heinrich Heine, German poet, 1821)
After watching this short film about the infamous book burning in Germany in 1933, consider what motivated people to burn books. What kinds of books were burned? How can books constitute a form of threat to certain governments?
I believe that based on this video, that the reason that people were burning books was out of fear. The Nazi soldiers understood that books expressed freedom and the expression of ideas and personally I believe that scared them and this is what caused them to want to burn books in the first place. These Nazi’s in Germany have expressed their fear of education from other countries and ideas from outside Germany, as stated in the video. This tells me that they are trying their best to suppress the idea of German people learning more about the outside world because they fear what their minds could do. The society in Germany was very controlled and Hitler wanted to keep power, if people had access to books and used them to expand their thinking, he may not have done so. Books by authors such as Hellen Keller and Ernest Hemingway were among those burned.
Books constitute threats to governments because they threaten to spark ideas and give people perspective. The government knew this and was scared of its potential to do so, hence the fact why they burned the books. They tried to educate society into believing that everything German was the way to think, by blocking access to material and reading from outside, this is what they believed. During the holocaust a few years later, it was clear that Germans believed in their superiority.