While at the Charles E. Young Research Library this quarter, I was surprised when my usual search for report material was halted by a solid wall of swastikas, Roman salutes and Joseph Goebbels’ endearing Nazi features. My initial assumption that I was reliving some best-forgotten past life experience faded when I cast my eye on the Germanic script straddling the montage, “Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings.”
The exhibit, sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is well-calculated to shock library-goers and raise interest in the emblematic censorship policies of the Third Reich.
Sadly, whatever educational purpose it allegedly has is totally deflated by the banal propaganda of which it is composed.
The project, on view in the YRL lobby from Feb. 24 until the auspicious date of April 20, will prove a bitter disappointment to anyone concerned with educating new generations of Americans about this traumatic period in history.
To begin with, the exhibit contains little more than some general descriptions of the student-organized book-burning of May 10, 1933, subsequent Nazi censorship and a vast sea of wartime U.S. agitprop, all loosely tied to McCarthyism and today’s sporadic attacks on Harry Potter.
Little effort is made to explore the beliefs underlying the German censorship effort, beliefs that were ultimately responsible for the rise of fascism and should be of the greatest interest to those who, like the museum, stand resolutely against it.
Instead, the whole episode is painted over as a totalitarian effort to destroy all free thought. Scant attention is paid to the selective nature of the event, which targeted certain works not merely for the simpleminded reason that they were Jewish or anti-Nazi but primarily for their modernizing, reductionistic and frequently neurotic nature.
This was completely in keeping with the fascist doctrine of traditionalist cultural revival. However heavy-handed, the book-burnings were an attempt to forcefully de-modernize German literature, not just to enforce public obedience.
This dumbing-down of wartime ideology to a standoff between enlightenment and ignorance, liberty and authoritarianism, ignores those qualities of fascism that made it such a formidable force in days past. It pigeonholes fascism into the realm of doddering, conservative totalitarianism.
The running movie clips from “Pleasantville,” the cartoons of cavemen marching alongside SA men, all reinforce the idea that fascists were ignorant bureaucrats obsessed with maintaining the status quo.
There is a profound difference between antimodernist traditionalism and senile cultural inertia. The people of the Holocaust museum have chosen to completely ignore this, and we are left wondering just what inspired the Nazis to adopt such themes as youth, violence and action. Walking past the exhibit, a casual observer would never recognize fascism as the self-consciously youthful, aggressive and revolutionary political movement that shook the 20th century.
The big mistake in this assumption is that it obscures the aspects of fascism that initially made it so attractive. Unless we understand the qualities that drew past generations to the fascists, we open ourselves to the emergence of similar movements in the future.
We would do well to remember that most of fascism’s earliest proponents were not military leaders or disgruntled workers, but students and university professors ““ just like ourselves.
Though no doubt well-intended, “Fighting the Fires of Hate” will do little for its creators’ cause. Presented as one sweeping generalization buoyed by reams of propaganda, this exhibit would have made Goebbels himself proud.
Tretiakoff is a third-year student studying computational and systems biology.