GU library showing book-burning exhibit

Book burning has a long and sad history in the course of human affairs. And perhaps no place was it more despicable than before and during World War II when the Nazis used it as a potent symbol of their hatred and persecution of Jews.

“Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings,” a traveling exhibit of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, is in its last few days at the Foley Center Library at Gonzaga University.

The exhibit, which will close Saturday, depicts acts of book burning by Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. It shows how burning books by authors such as Sinclair Lewis, Karl Marx and Ernest Hemingway raised the ire of Americans, who found the burning offensive to their cherished First Amendment principles.

The exhibition includes displays of period artifacts, documents and news coverage, along with film, video and newsreel footage. It also explores the post-World War II years and how Nazi book burning has affected American life, politics, literature and popular culture.

Stephanie Plowman, special collections librarian at GU, said many of the more than 1,200 people who have seen the exhibit since it opened in March have been moved to tears.

“And for me, as a librarian, when I look at book burning, it is inexplicable,” she said. “The words on the pages can be destroyed, but those words live on beyond the fire.”

Gonzaga has added six displays of its own to the traveling exhibit while it is here, including a group of burned books and displays showing that the ignoble tradition of book burning still lives today – even in the United States.

Plowman notes that a Harry Potter book was the subject of book burning in New Mexico in 2004, and the Jewish Talmud was publicly burned last January in Minnesota by an Aryan Nations group.