Insights

Why would you burn a book? What makes books so dangerous? The Nazi book burnings show us how much the regime feared books. But, it wasn’t the books themselves that they feared, it was what they represented. Books represent knowledge and the free flow of ideas, they engage the human mind and connect people. The Nazi regime recognized the unpredictability of having free flow of knowledge. For a regime that was trying to control the narrative of a nation by spreading propaganda, censoring and subsequently burning all the books that were “un-german” was a way to do so.

Even though the book Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse was printed and the text existed in many copies, the regime still managed to find the physical copies of the book that existed in various libraries and burn them. If digital copies of this book had existed and people had access to digital technologies during this time, the Nazi regime would’ve found it much harder to control the flow of knowledge by banning and getting rid of this book and all other books involved in the burnings since digital copies can be duplicated and shared a lot quicker than their physical counter parts.