HELEN KELLER'S WARNING TO NAZI GERMANY

"You can burn my books… but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds."

In 1933, as the Nazis began taking over Germany, their parasitic despotism spared no effort in co-opting the country's people, ideas, and culture. Among the many oppressive tactics was a command to destroy all books deemed to reflect an "un-German spirit." Nazi leaders enlisted mobs of students in ripping such books from bookstores and libraries, then setting them ablaze in the streets. Within days, a book-burning epidemic spread like urban wildfire across Germany.

Among the blacklisted authors was Helen Keller. Upon hearing the news, Keller, ordinarily a legendary optimist and champion of the human spirit, promptly issued a searing letter to the student body of Germany. Found in Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture(public library) — that fascinating effort to quantify cultural change through the dual lens of history and digital data by analyzing 30,000 books — Keller's message is at once scathingly outraged and full of inextinguishable humanity.

 

May 9, 1933

To the student body of Germany:

History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.

You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds. I gave all the royalties of my books for all time to the German soldiers blinded in the World War with no thought in my heart but love and compassion for the German people.

I acknowledge the grievous complications that have led to your intolerance; all the more do I deplore the injustice and unwisdom of passing on to unborn generations the stigma of your deeds.

Do not imagine that your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit His judgment upon you. Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung around your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men.

Helen Keller

BY MARIA POPOVA