Fighting fires of hate

By Dawn Setzer

Just a few months after Adolf Hitler came to power in Nazi Germany 75 years ago, German university students launched an "Action Against the Un-German Spirit," an attack so vile that it still resonates in American politics, literature and popular culture.

Targeting authors ranging from Helen Keller and Ernest Hemingway to Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, the students orchestrated book burnings across Germany that foreshadowed the realization of 19th-century German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine's warning: "Where one burns books, one soon burns people."

A traveling exhibition coming to the Charles E. Young Research Library will provide visitors with a vivid look at the first steps the Nazis took to suppress freedom of expression, the strong response that occurred in the U.S. immediately and during World War II, and the continued presence of this incendiary event in public discourse throughout the ensuing years.

Organized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., "Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings" will be on display Feb. 24-April 20.

Covered widely in the media, the book burnings provoked immediate reaction in the U.S. from writers, artists, scholars, journalists, librarians, labor unions, clergy, political figures and others. Newspaper editorials and political cartoonists denounced the bonfires, and American writers, including Keller, Lewis Mumford and Sinclair Lewis, wrote open letters condemning the students' actions.

The American Jewish Congress organized massive street demonstrations in more than a dozen U.S. cities to protest Nazi persecution of Jews, using the events of May 10 to broaden the coalition of anti-Nazi groups. As the war progressed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt evoked the book burnings as a vivid example of the difference between a democratic America and Nazi Germany, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt condemned them in her daily newspaper column. A decade after the book burnings, organizations that include the Library of Congress, American Library Association and the Office of War Information used the anniversary to rally Americans around the war effort.

The horror of that event is still embedded in literature and popular culture, in such films as "Pleasantville" and "Field of Dreams" and in episodes of "The Waltons" and "M*A*S*H." And book burnings are not just an artifact of the past; J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books have been the target of public bonfires.

The traveling exhibition is complemented by an exhibit of related items from collections in the UCLA Library. From the medical library of Caesar Hirsch will be shown books and journals that were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933 after the physician and his family fled Stuttgart. The materials were returned to the family in 2001 after a researcher discovered them in a library at Tubingen University.

Also on view will be a draft of Franze Werfel’s "Einander," one of the books the Nazis burned, and a magazine in which Ray Bradbury's "The Fireman" appears. The story later evolved into "Fahrenheit 451." Visitors can also see items from the archives of Ernst Toch and Eric Zeist, two Austrian émigré composers who left their homeland because of the book burnings and other anti-Jewish actions the Germans were taking. They eventually settled in Southern California.

Find more information about the exhibition and related events or call (310) 825-6925.