Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, Andre Malraux…books by these and other writers were chucked onto the bonfires started by Nazi arsonists 75 years ago.

Over the weekend, Stan Persky was in Berlin’s August Bebel Platz (Bebel, incidentally, was the German leftist leader who dubbed antisemitism the “socialism of fools”) and wrote this superb report:

If one wants a more shudder-inducing, immediate sense of the event being remembered, it’s as close as your computer. The Nazis, obsessed with recording the triumphs of what they expected to be a Thousand Year Reich, scrupulously filmed the May 1933 book burning. There are the crackling flames, and there’s Goebbels, thundering away, in a film clip available at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website. When I later mildly complained to a friend that the commemoration was fairly unexciting, he quipped, “Well, what did you want them to do, burn some books?”

Do read the rest. And a tip of the hat to Terry Glavin.