Recalling a sinister prelude to the Holocaust, several cities throughout Germany on Monday held ceremonies to observe the 60th anniversary of the first Nazi book-burning, in which books by such authors as Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka and Sigmund Freud were torched.
In Berlin’s Opera Square, where the book-burning began, German Jewish writer Stefan Heym read from the work of British writer Salman Rushdie, a secular Moslem whose work provoked the late Iranian cleric Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a death warrant against him.
“Freedom of speech is everything,” the 80-year-old Heym quoted from Rushdie, who today lives in hiding.
The northern port city of Rostock, which gained notoriety last year for a series of violent racist incidents, had invited members of the Israeli Knesset to its commemoration.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
