GERMANY: Verboten Volumes

To teach democracy to postwar Germans, the United States Information Service set up 40 Amerika Häuser and stocked them with a wide selection of reading material in English and German, including books banned by Hitler. Last year some 15 million Germans flocked to the U.S. libraries, and the then U.S. High Commissioner, John J. McCloy, praised the scheme for counteracting twelve years of "one-sided information."

By last week the works of 25 or 30 authors had vanished from the USIS bookshelves, and some Germans chuckled wryly at the news. To Americans, Germans frequently remarked: "We had to go through this under...

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