When Helen Keller Confronted the Nazis; whereas what America is doing by re-writing classic books is in no way any different, while peddling pure SMUT in todays books, under the guise of Free Speech

Anti-fascist organizations, American Jewish groups, and numerous writers, scholars, and journalists recognized the ominous intent of the Nazi “culture war” that made blood and race the source of inspiration. The American Jewish Congress hoped to broaden the coalition of anti-Nazi Americans by using the May 10 book burnings as a unifying cause. It urged mass street demonstrations to take place that same day. As the German literary blacklists circulated in the press, American authors published declarations of solidarity with their condemned brethren. Throughout the 1930s, as the flood of German émigré writers rose, American literary organizations provided aid where they could in response to the crisis.MORE

A peddler, in British English pedlar, also known as a canvasser, cheapjack,monger, higler or solicitor (with negative connotations since the 16th century), is a travelling vendor of goods. In England, the term was mostly used for travellers hawking goods in the countryside to small towns and villages; they might also be called tinkers or gypsies. In London more specific terms were used, such as costermonger. There has long been a suspicion of dishonest or petty criminal activity associated with pedlars and travellers.

Banned and/or Challenged Books

from the Radcliffe Publishing Course

Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

Helen Keller’s Response to Nazi Book-Burning

this letter is from American Foundation of the Blind

 

To the Student Body of Germany, May 9, 1933 History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them. 

You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels, and will continue to quicken other minds. I gave all the royalties of my books to the soldiers blinded in the World War with no thought in my heart but love and compassion for the Germany people. 

Do not imagine your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit his Judgment upon you. Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung round your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men. 

Helen Keller 

When Helen Keller Confronted the Nazis

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A New York Times editorial sarcastically suggested that the Nazis might next begin “burning microphones” to stamp out free speech. Time called the Nazis’ action “a bibliocaust,” and Newsweek described it as “a holocaust of books.” This was one of the first instances in which the term “holocaust” (an ancient Greek word meaning a burnt offering to a deity) was used in connection with the Nazis.

The outcry around the world included this moving letter from Keller, addressed to “the Student Body of Germany.”

“History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas,” Keller wrote. “Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them. You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels, and will continue to quicken other minds. I gave all the royalties of my books to the soldiers blinded in the World War with no thought in my heart but love and compassion for the German people.”

“Do not imagine your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here,” she added. “God sleepeth not, and He will visit his Judgment upon you. Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung round your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men.”

Various foreign leaders also criticized the book burnings, but the Hitler regime ignored such protests. Perhaps if the words of condemnation had been accompanied by diplomatic or economic consequences, the Nazis would have had to reconsider.

Five years later, protests by American college students helped prevent another mass book burning by the Nazis, this time in Austria. Shortly after Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, the Nazis gave the Austrian National Library a long list of books to be removed and burned.

Students at Williams College in Massachusetts sent a telegram to the Austrian library, offering to buy the books. Riots broke out on the Williams campus when anti-Nazi students tried to burn Hitler in effigy, and pro-Nazi students used fire hoses to stop them.

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