YRL Exhibits
Main Exhibit | Faculty Exhibit

 

Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings

February 24-April 20
Main Exhibit

Seventy-five years ago this May, just a few months after Adolf Hitler came to power in Nazi Germany and six years before World War II began, German university students launched an Action Against the Un-German Spirit. Targeting authors ranging from Helen Keller and Ernest Hemingway to Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, they orchestrated book burnings across Germany that foreshadowed the realization of nineteenth-century German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine's warning "where one burns books, one soon burns people."

Organized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, this traveling exhibition and its online counterpart provide 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 the war, and the continued presence of this incendiary event in public discourse throughout the ensuing years. It is complemented by an exhibit of items from related UCLA Library collections, including those of Ray Bradbury, Dr. Caesar Hirsch, Ernst Toch, Franz Werfel, and Eric Zeisl.

A series of public programs will be scheduled in conjunction with the exhibition; as the schedule is confirmed, they will be posted on this page. To receive an email listing of the programs, send your name and email address to Dawn Setzer.

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Elisabeth Le Guin,
Associate Professor of Musicology

May 2008
YRL Faculty Exhibit

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