To burn books is simply a fundamental repression of ideas.

I mean, what can a book do? And why is it so dangerous

that it needs to be

physically

annihilated?

In 1933,

the National Socialist German Workers Party, called the Nazis for short,

came to power in Germany and established a

dictatorship under the leadership of

Adolf Hitler.

The Nazis intended

to re-arm Germany

and to reorganize the German state

on the principle

that the German

ethnic group or race was superior to all others in Europe.

They suppressed all dissent

within Germany,

making it a crime to criticize the regime.

The newly established Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment set up

various chambers to control

specific aspects of German culture such as art,

literature,

theater,

film,

music,

virtually all forms of entertainment and

all forms of dissemination of news.

In 1933,

in April, Nazi German students decided to

organize a nationwide

book burning

program to eliminate foreign influence, to purify German culture as they saw it.

So you have committees of students meeting with professors together

deciding what categories of books in these university libraries

would count as un-German. They didn't see themselves as suppressing culture. They saw

themselves as advancing Aryan German culture.

I remember very distinctly

a conversation between my parents

and some friends

who were all shocked that a nation like the Germans,

an educated, highly intelligent nation, would burn books.

Books never hurt anybody.

The event that the students planned occurred on May 10,

1933.

In each

German university city,

thirty-four of them in all,

thousands of people gathered together at a public place in which books that had

been confiscated either by the students themselves or by Nazi Party officials,

often with the help of police, were brought and dumped in a pile. Student

leaders exhorted their followers and the listening crowds to swear an oath by

the fire,

to destroy and combat subversive and un-German

literature.

"For the national treason against our soldiers in World War I,

we're burning Hemingway's books." --Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister

himself spoke at the book

burning in Berlin.

It is amazing to me

the variety of

books

that was

burned on that night and thereafter. -Among the authors whose books

were burned

were Ernest Hemingway...both Mann brothers, Thomas and Heinrich... --There's the German

writer,

Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote

the famous book All Quiet on the Western Front...

Helen Keller...

Jack London, the American nature writer... There's very little that unites all of these

books really except that they were all considered dangerous by the Nazis.

A grand total of the number of volumes, perhaps best estimates

would be between eighty or ninety thousand volumes. For weeks afterwards,

books were confiscated from libraries,

from bookshops, and from private collections.

In 1939,

the Nazi regime initiated what became the Second World War.

During the course of this war,

the Nazis begin to implement their

population policy,

a priority element of which was the annihilation of six million Jews on the

European continent

in a

mass murder, a genocide that we

now call the Holocaust.

I was about 11

when i read the diary of Anne Frank. And it was translated into Persian.

Reading about Anne Frank and millions of other Iranians reading Anne Frank,

they discover

that they are that little girl. And that what happened to that little

girl was a supreme act of injustice.

And so they connect to her in away that no political

sermon,

or propaganda could affect. The

first thing every

totalitarian regime does, along with confiscation

and mutilation of reality, is confiscation of history and

confiscation of culture. I think they all happen,

almost simultaneously.

And they surely happened in my experience when I was living in Iran.

For me it's both

heartbreaking and,

quote unquote, a sort of badge of honor

that my book is not allowed to be published in Iran. It has been

translated into thirty-five languages and not in Persian.

Really all literature is dangerous to a regime that

fears the free flow of ideas.

Because the literature in its most fundamental way is meant to

forge connections among human beings. --Because you don't know where it takes you.

Knowledge is always unpredictable,

there is always a risk. It is like Alice jumping down that hole, running

after that white rabbit, not knowing where she goes.

And for tyrants, control is the main thing. They don't like this

unpredictability,

they don't want the citizens

to connect to the unknown parts of themselves, of their past, and to connect

to the world. --For a totalitarian regime this is perhaps the most

dangerous thing.

Because these regimes are predicated on the idea

that the people within them will resign themselves

the thinking that this is all there is. And that there aren't any other options.

I think the shame

is ours,

is everyone's. We all

have to think

that as humans we share the best and worst,

and that as human beings what happened then

can happen again. --How serious those warning signs were taken

is exemplified by my mother,

who, when I asked her if we had to worry about a guy like Hitler,

she said, "No.

We are living in a democracy.

We have the protection of the police. Nobody's going to hurt us."

So talk about warning signs, there were plenty of them.

Did w Did we take them seriously?

My family didn't. Never believed

that Germans would stoop so low

that they would implement the threats

which one fanatic uttered...

And so, our

own life

went from bad to worse

and it culminated in July of 1942,

when we were arrested

and sent to a concentration camp.

To make this clear,

it was a life without hope.

The only thing that they cannot

put in jail, or

prevent from physically

leaving, is your mind, is your imagination. That cannot be captured.

But the idea

of freedom

should be kept alive, even if it's between two people or three people. Talk

about it,

think about it, live about it, and hope about it.