Summary of the burning of the books
Answers
When the Regime
commanded the unlawful books to be burned,
teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires.
Then a banished writer, one of the best,
scanning the list of excommunicated texts,
became enraged: he’d been excluded!
He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath,
to write fierce letters to the morons in power —
Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen —
Haven’t I always reported the truth?
Now here you are, treating me like a liar!
Burn me!Purpose: To express the reaction by many to the Nazi policy of burning literature they disapproved of.
Explanation/Analysis: Racial policy in Nazi Germany was connected to censorship as books by Jewish authors were widely burned and banned. Literature from communist, socialist, pacifist, and anarchist authors were also subject to destruction by the Nazi regime. The practice began in 1933 and was considered a way of "cleansing" the county and ridding of "un-German" material, similar to the way the Nazis considered exterminating the Jews and others a form of "cleansing" the country. In regard to the burnings, Joseph Goebbles claimed "The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end," as the literature was destroyed. Brecht himself had much of his works burned as he was a socialist, and eventually fled Germany to escape the Nazis.