A Burnt Book Predicts Book Burnings (4/6)

The harrowing images of the Nazi book burnings in 1933 came to represent a steadfast belief that, in order to achieve a fully pure and strong country, all evidence of ‘non-Aryan’ existence needed to be purged. Heinrich Heine was a Jewish German writer who composed a play entitled ‘Almansor’ in 1821, which spoke in depth about the Christian Spanish Inquisitors burning the Quran, the holy book of the Islamic faith. In what should be the iconic quote of the 1930s and 1940s, Heine wrote: “”Where men burn books, they will burn people also in the end.”