HomeBanned Books Week Book Burning 20th Century

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings." (German: "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.")—Heinrich Heine, from his play Almansor (1821)

• Nazi Germany, 1933.
• A Look Back at . . . “The Grapes of Wrath”, 1939–1940. “Still, censorship of reading materials was very much in evidence in libraries throughout the country. One major target of the censor's ire was, of course, ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ which was considered vulgar, immoral, and even ‘bestial.’ The book was not only banned in places like Camden, NJ, but in East St. Louis, where the board of trustees ordered all three of the library's copies to be burned. [5] Here in California, the most contentious battle against ‘Grapes of Wrath’ took place in Kern County, the heart of the state’s agricultural community.”
• Wilhelm Reich, 1897–1957, 1956. “While Reich appealed his sentence, the government carried out the destruction of orgone accumulators and literature. In Maine, several boxes of literature were burned, and accumulators and accumulator materials either destroyed or dismantled. In New York City, on August 23, 1956, the FDA supervised the burning of several tons of Reich’s publications in one of the city’s garbage incinerators, including titles that were only to have been banned. Among the materials burned were:
• • Orgone Energy Bulletin (12,189 copies)
  • International Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research (6,261 copies)
  • Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics (2,900 copies)
  • Annals of the Orgone Institute (2976 copies)
  • The Oranur Experiment (872 copies)
  • Character Analysis
  • Cosmic Superimposition
  • Ether, God, and Devil
  • Listen, Little Man
  • People in Trouble
  • The Cancer Biopathy
  • The Function of the Orgasm
  • The Mass Psychology of Fascism
  • The Murder of Christ
  • The Sexual Revolution

  This destruction of literature constitutes one of the most heinous examples of censorship in United States history.”

• Kosovo: Burned Books and Blasted Shrines.
• Burning Books at Berkeley.
  "On September 27, 2000, Accuracy in Academia's Dan Flynn spoke at the University of California-Berkeley to promote his book, Cop Killer: How Mumia-Abu Jamal Conned Millions Into Believing He Was Framed. In the best spirit of the current obsession with tolerance and diversity at American universities, protesters first shouted down Flynn with obscenities to prevent him from speaking, then seized copies of his books and burned them outside the building Flynn was supposed to speak at."

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