Book burning is the practice of ceremoniously destroying by fire one or more copies of a
book or other written material. In modern times other forms of media, such as
records,
CDs and
video tapes, have also been ceremoniously burned. The practice, often carried out publicly, is usually motivated by moral,
political or
religious objections to the material.
The writer Heinrich Heine famously said in 1821 "Where they burn books, they will end in burning human beings." (Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen). Just over a century later the Nazis did exactly as Heine had forecast.
The Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451 is about a fictional future society that has institutionalized book burning.
Incidents of book burnings have included:
- Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. Acts 19:19
- The books of Arius and his followers (325 CE), after the first Council of Nicaea[?], for heresy
- The books of Nestorius, after an edict of Theodosius II, for heresy (435 CE)
- In 1497 the Bonfire of the Vanities[?], preached by Girolamo Savonarola, consumed pornography, lewd pictures, pagan books, gaming tables, cosmetics, copies of Boccaccio's Decameron, and all the works of Ovid which could be found in Florence.
- The works of Jewish authors and other "degenerate" books were burned by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.
- May 10, 1933 in the Opernplatz, Berlin, Germany, SA troops and student groups burn over 20,000 books, including works by Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Karl Marx and H.G. Wells.
- The Satanic Verses, burnt by Muslims who considered it blasphemous
- the Harry Potter books, burnt by American Christians who considered them satanic
- the book Making of a Godol: A Study of Episodes in the Lives of Great Torah Personalities[?] (2003) by Nathan Kamenetsky[?] has been banned in ultra-orthodox Jewish circles and "publicly burnt in the famed yeshiva of Lakewood, N.J.". [1] (http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.03.14/arts1.html)
- please add more famous book burnings here, in chronological order if possible
Other famous items ceremoniously burnt in protest:
