The purpose of the destruction of certain literature and persecution of the authors was to express the rejection of communism and also as an attempt to maintain the purity of cultural symbols in Germany.

“Romanticism, nationalism, racism, social Darwinism, and anti-modernism were the pillars of National Socialist cultural policy. From romanticism came the conviction that peoples expressed their special Geist (spirit of genius) in their language, literature, and customs.” (Hill 10)

Thus, destruction such as book burnings was a way to censor literature that discussed any thoughts or beliefs that opposed these pillars. Burning books is a form of hegemonic domination; it provides the dominant the ability to hinder our freedom of expression.

“Censorship by definition is an act of suppression carried out from a position of power… often out of fear of exposure to other ideas or plain self-interest.” (Thomas 25)

Censorship can also include questioning the value of any multimedia such as books, music, and television shows. In this case, the censoring of literature occurred because of majority party, led by the National Socialist Party and aided by the National Socialist German Students Association, had certain desires to maintain German culture and also believed that their biggest threat was the Jewish people.

Authors who were opposed by the Nazi Party were subject to persecution continuously in the years prior to the book-burnings. As time progressed it would appear as though the methods of harassment escalated. The Nazi Party would enter bookshops and remove books that they did not approve of, interrupt authors’ speeches, make threatening phone calls, vandalize homes with graffiti and attacks, as well as publicly mock the authors. Some notable authors who were persecuted were Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas Mann, Arnold Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger, Carl von Ossietzky, and Fritz von Unruh. (Adam and Fernando 206)

There is a famous line from Heinrich Heine’s play Almansor, which was written in 1821. “Where they burn books they will ultimately burn people.” (Heine 187) Bibliocaust is a term given to the Nazi book-burnings because they “foreshadowed the mass killings in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps”(Bosmajian18) during the Holocaust. This quote completely embodies the connection between the two events. It could be believed that the “bonfire of books inspired the crematory ovens” (Adam and Fernando 206) used by the Nazis to burn the Jews and other condemned outcasts in European countries such as Germany and Poland.

The Nationalist Socialist German Students Association asked all of its members to join in the fight to preserve German language by disposing of any books from their private libraries that opposed “new” Germany such as literature written by Jewish authors as well as any other author whose writings went against the Nationalist Socialist Party. They also partook in public vandalism as well as spent time preparing for public book burnings. They “planned a nationwide campaign to gather books written by racial or political opponents, and to burn them publicly in university towns.” (Thacker 147) In preparation for the burnings, the GSA publicized documents and propaganda containing their twelve theses. This document “described the fundamentals of a ‘pure’ national language and culture.” (Ushmm.org) It also claimed that the Jews are their most dangerous threat to the corruption of the German culture since they believed that the Jewish people could only think in an “un-German” manner. The document concluded with a list of demands from the German Student’s Association such as complete censorship and segregation of German and Jewish texts and education. (Cityvisions.com) On May 10, 1933, about 20 000 books, ”were brought from various libraries around Berlin and consigned to a huge bonfire by students of the Opera Square in front of the University.”(Thacker 147)

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