In the great square before Berlin University the new barbarians screamed "Down with un-German trash and smut!" Brownshirted students paraded by torch light, singing the Horst Wessel Lied. At midnight, May 10, 1933, when they lighted a bonfire of 20,000 books, as "subversions that strike at the root of German thought," Joseph Goebbels rhapsodized:
"These flames . . . light up the new era. . . . Spirits are awakening, and oh, century, it is a joy to live!"
A Matter of Degree. Last week, Berlin's new anti-Nazi municipal government decreed a "literary cleanup." It proposed to...