1933: Germans are burning books, why?

Hi, I was just watching the first episode of World at War when I saw the Germans throwing and burning books. Why? Were they doing this only for the jewish books or for all the books?

Thanks for your help!

 

People and governments that burn books usually are in a cause in which they want to control the thoughts and values of the population by eliminating ideas from books that threaten their cause.

 

Correct - its quite an old pass time for insecure, controlling goverments...a version of the thought police.

 

Ok I understand now so they also burned non jewish books?

 

Does anyone know if there was an official list of burnt authors? I know there was Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque for instance. Not all were anti Nazi, being a pacifist was "enough" to be banned as well. Remarque was a pacifist and wrote about the horrors of the great war.

 

Get a copy of the scifi movie...Faranheit 451. Although not ww2, and the book burning itself was before ww2...the movie may give you some understanding.

 

One listing:

When Books Burn: Lists of Banned Books, 1933-1939

 

Kittos Kai!

 

The answers so far are both correct and good, but I think they leave out an aspect that was as important as the books chosen to be burned.

In a Communist country, indeed most totalitarian societies, the government or ruling body would come in the middle of the night with nameless, faceless men to collect all the "unacceptable or subversive" material to be taken away. They would claim to be acting in defense of the people, without telling them the details.

The Nazi's took it one, clever step further. They made the people themselves an eager and willing participant. They brought these books from home or a bookstore and chucked them publicly, in front of their neighbors and friends, into the fire. It was not simply the government acting, but seemingly the people.

The Fire was important, because it gave the tawdry spectacle a sense of primal and cathartic granduer. This is why so many Nazi events took place at night and included some aspect of fire or light. Much of Nazi political thought and theory involved the concept of throwing off the old decadent way's for a simpler and more equatable society.

As with most such nonsense, the reality never caught up with the promise.

 

Many totalitarian regimes acted the same way , not only politics but also in religion. Think of the inquisition which "purified evil" by fire.

 

A good comment - Runs parralel with the Hippy movement...coming from a different angle...

 

Why should everything have some rational, political, ideological, or any other biased explanation? What happened in the Nazi Germany has happened before and afterwards, everywhere. Burning of books in Nazi Germany was just an extreme form of anti-intellectualism. There is no society immune to this phenomenon; just it appears in different forms. Soviets didn't like bourgeois, Nazis hated Jewish intelligentsia, and Democrats considered liberals as the Red Danger. Anti-intellectualism isn't an exclusive property of "totalitarian" societies.

 

THe US has people who have and would like to ban books. There was a famous incident at a game in the 70's in which people were invited to burn their disco records. The promotors failed to consider the effect of burning things on a plastic field.

 

Better to get the book.

 

Strictly my opinion but I liked the movie but thought the book was better in particular the philosophical points were much clearer. Been a while since I've read the book or seen the movie though.