Books Cannot Be Killed by Fire: The German Freedom Library and the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books as Agents of Cultural Memory

This article looks at two libraries founded in 1934 as counter-symbols to the Nazi book burning: the German Freedom Library in Paris and the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books at the Brooklyn Jewish Center in New York. It describes these two libraries as agents of cultural memory, as privileged sites for redefining German, German-Jewish, and Jewish-American cultural identity in times of radical change. Created on different continents and in different social, cultural, and political contexts, they reflect the dynamics of cultural memory from 1933 through World War II and the Cold War era to the present day. Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons.