We remember an image from “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” a movie set in Berlin in the 1930s. There are books piled high to create a mound. A Nazi soldier strikes a match and sets them on fire. Celebratory music and cheers can be heard in the background.
The real event that this fictionalized version was based on happened close to 90 years ago in college towns across Germany, as university students burned over 25,000 books in an attempt to erase Jewish and Western ideas. Books by Jewish European authors like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, as well as by American authors like Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller, turned to ashes in the event Newsweek called “a holocaust of books.”
