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PUTTING OUT THE FIRES
Just over 200 years ago, the German poet, playwright and critic Heinrich Heine wrote, ‘Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.’ (Almansor: A Tragedy, 1823), writes Gary Dalkin
This famous line from an otherwise forgotten verse play or dramatic poem has been variously translated as, ‘Wherever books are burned, men in the end will also burn,’ or, ‘Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.’
In the 1930s as a prelude to the Holocaust the Nazis famously burnt books which met with their disapproval.
A little over 70 years ago Ray Bradbury published his classic science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451, about a future society in which the job of a fireman is to incinerate books, once saying, ‘You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.’