Book-Burning: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|''"That was but a prelude; where they have burned books, they will ultimately also burn people."''|'''Heinrich Heine''', from the 1823 tragic play ''Almansor''.}}
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How do you show that your [[Police State|totalitarian regime]] is [[Kick the Dog|monstrous]] and trying to [[The Evils of Free Will|stamp out all free thought]]? Or that your [[Moral Guardians]] have crossed the line into [[Culture Police]]? Have 'em hold a good old-fashioned book burning!
The
[[Captain Obvious|Writers usually have pretty strong feelings on this subject.]] (Bookstores often have ''different,'' somewhat conflicted, feelings. If someone's buying armloads of books from your store, their intent to burn may not concern you much.)
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== [[Film]] ==
* In ''[[The Day After Tomorrow]]'', the main characters, who are trapped in the New York Public Library, throw books into the fireplace in order to keep warm. During one scene, they are going through the library choosing which books to burn and which ones to
* In ''[[Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade]]'', at one point Indy finds himself at Nazi rally where they are burning books. As an archeologist, he can't be happy about it, but he's trying to blend in so he doesn't do anything about it. He does get his father's Grail diary signed by Hitler though.
* In ''[[Agora]]'', [[Tear Jerker|Christian fanatics destroy the library of the Alexandrian Serapeum, toppling statues and columns and burning scrolls of "pagan filth" in bonfires in the couryard.]]
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* [[Ray Bradbury]]'s ''[[Fahrenheit 451]]'' is one of the iconic examples of this, set in a world where nearly all literature has been banned and burned.
* Early in ''[[Don Quixote]]'', the priest and the housekeeper of the eponymous knight go through the chivalry books that have turned the man mad and, in an act of penance, burn most of them. The comments of the priest express the literary tastes of the author, though he offers some sharp criticisms of Cervantes' own works. He does, notably, save ''Tirant lo Blanc''.
** However, notice that this example is an [[Unbuilt Trope]]: Spain at [[The Cavalier Years]] had just discovered the printing press, and books were considered [[New Media Are Evil]]. Don Quixote’s niece and [[Old Retainer]] asked the [[Moral Guardian]]’s permission to do the
* At the conclusion of the novel "[[Auto Da Fe]]" by Nobel-Prize winner [[Elias Canetti]], the bibliophile protagonist immolates himself on a pile of his own library.
* The Japanese novel ''[[Toshokan Sensou]]'' is about the conflict between two military organizations after the Japanese government passed a law that allows the censorship of any media deemed to be potentially harmful to Japanese society, including book burning.
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* In ''[[Anne of Green Gables]]'', Anne watches in horror as her caretaker burns her book containing the Tennyson poem "The Lady of Shalott" as punishment for reading instead of doing her chores.
* The page quote above comes from ''Almansor'', a tragic play written in 1823 by Jewish playwright Heinrich Heine, in reference to the burning of copies of the Islamic holy book, the Qur'an, by the "Catholic monarchs," Ferdinand and Isabella, following the conquest of the Muslim country of Grenada, the final stage of the Reconquista of Spain. And indeed, the words proved prophetic as [[The Spanish Inquisition]] (started by those same monarchs around 1480, twelve years before the conquest) was going down at about this time, which had many people being [[Burn the Witch|burned at the stake]] for heresy, and would lead to serious persecution of Jews and Muslims.
** Following the end of the Second World War, the famous quote from ''Almansor'' was engraved on a memorial that was erected at the site of the infamous Nazi book-burnings of 1933 at Berlin's Opernplatz (which is now called Bebelplatz). ''Almansor'' was among the works by Jewish authors that was consigned to the
* The first emperor of the Chi'n Dynasty in Ancient China did such an extreme case of this in ''[[Breaking the Wall]]'' that all the destroyed knowledge actually created a whole new world known as the Land Born of Smoke and Sacrifice.
* In the ''[[Elemental Logic]]'' quartet, the Library at Kisha was burned early on in the Sainnite invasion, which is considered a great tragedy. The loss of many books and the country's main center of higher education actually led to the Shaftali losing a significant part of their writing system- the meanings of many of their glyphs (ideographs, used along with an alphabet system or separately as part of a system of telling the future) were forgotten in a short period of time because they were slightly esoteric knowledge to begin with, and no lexicon listing the meanings of all the glyphs survived the burning. A large part of the plot of the third book deals with {{spoiler|a time-displaced character stealing a lexicon and hiding it so that the "missing" glyphs can be rediscovered in her present.}}
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