Raising Heil

There’s something about images of a burning book. It’s like seeing pictures of famine-stricken children or Hillary Clinton in tears. You know something is terribly wrong in the world. The Nazi book bonfires of 1933 awakened a spirit of outrage as soon as photos of brown-shirt students building conflagrations out of “anti-German” (read: Jewish) literature and works by other “degenerate” authors (Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sigmund Freud) splashed across the newspapers. Scottsdale Civic Center Library revisits the madness with its “Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings” exhibit, which examines the Nazi-book-burning impact on American thought and discourse.

Dec. 20-Feb. 12, 2007