biblioclasm

Among many other events of great pith and moment, our faithful chronicler records that on this evening in 1933 Hermann Goebbels agitated an already blood-thirty fraternal order, still giddy from their organised attack on the Sex Research Institute of Magnus Hirschfeld earlier that same week, and expressed their rage with a symbolic book burning (Bücherverbrennung) in the square (now known as Bebelplatz) before the State Opera building in Berlin.
The Student Union coordinated other similar events in university towns across Germany, attended by area Nazi officials, aiming to consign to the flames everything that was un-German. This was not the last of such rituals but some twenty thousand volumes deemed subversive where destroyed that night in Berlin alone, including works published by socio-economic theorist Karl Marx, novelists Thomas and Heinrich Mann, the Bauhäuslern, Erich Maria Remarque who penned the pacifistic recollection All is Quiet on the Western Front, playwright and lyricist Berthold Brecht, imminent scientist Albert Einstein and psychologist Sigmund Freud.