Traveling exhibit on Nazi book burnings will open at State Library Aug. 27

On May 10, 1933, just a few months after Adolf Hitler came to power in Nazi Germany and a full six years before World War II, German university students carried out an "Action Against the Un-German Spirit."

They targeted authors ranging from Helen Keller and Ernest Hemingway to Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Their orchestrated book burnings across Germany would come to underscore German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine's 19th century warning, "Where one burns books, one soon burns people."

The State Library of Louisiana, 701 N. 4th St., will host a special traveling exhibition, Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings, organized and circulated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The exhibit opens with reception at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 27.

Fighting the Fires of Hate provides a vivid look at the first steps the Nazis took to suppress freedom of expression, and the strong response that occurred in the United States both immediately and in the years thereafter. The exhibition focuses on how the book burnings became a potent symbol during World War II in America's battle against Nazism, and concludes by examining their continued impact on our public discourse.

Covered widely in the media, the Nazi book burnings provoked immediate, strong reactions in the United States among writers, artists, scholars, journalists, librarians, labor unions, clergy, political figures and others.

Newspaper editorials and political cartoonists denounced the bonfires. Newsweek called it a "holocaust of books;" Time a "bibliocaust." American writers including Helen Keller, Lewis Mumford and Sinclair Lewis - some of whose books had been consigned to the flames - wrote open letters condemning the book burnings.

The American Jewish Congress organized massive street demonstrations in more than a dozen U.S. cities to protest Nazi persecution of Jews, using May 10 and the book burnings to broaden the coalition of anti-Nazi groups.

"Today, mass book burnings bring to mind almost nightmarish images," said State Librarian Rebecca Hamilton. "To destroy a book is an attempt to destroy a people's culture and freedom of thought. This exhibition brings to life the horrors that eventually became one of the most gruesome examples of a government's attempts to purify a society into its own vision of perfection - The Holocaust."

"Americans were deeply offended by the book burnings, which were a gross assault against their core values," said Edward Phillips, exhibitions director at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Their response was intense, in fact so strong that throughout the war the government used the book burnings to help define the nature of the enemy to the American public."

The exhibition also focuses on how organizations ranging from the Library of Congress, the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the National Council of Women to the Writer's War Board, the Council on Books in Wartime and the Office of War Information used the 1943 10th anniversary of the book burnings to rally Americans around the war effort.

It documents how the importance of books and the free marketplace of ideas were given currency through the slogan "Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas," which appeared in posters, proclamations, radio broadcasts and scores of other outlets.

The exhibition concludes with the postwar years, exploring how the Nazi book burnings have continued to resonate in American politics, literature and popular culture. It features post-war evocations of book burnings, including a McCarthy-era speech in which President Eisenhower urged Dartmouth graduates, "Don't join the book burners"; films such as Pleasantville, Field of Dreams, episodes of The Waltons and M*A*S*H, the death threats against Salman Rushdie, and the public burning of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books.

"Appropriately enough, the exhibition precedes Banned Books Week, which is recognized from Sept. 27 through Oct. 3," Hamilton said. "Closely after that on Oct. 17, we strike quite a different note with the 2009 Louisiana Book Festival where we celebrate and give honor to all books."

Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings will run through Sept. 20, then continue its nationwide travel. It includes displays of period artifacts, documents and news coverage, along with film, video and newsreel footage.

Library hours are 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday. The exhibit is free.

For more information on the exhibition, call (225) 219-9503 or visit http://www.state.lib.la.us or http://www.ushmm.org .