Books Cannot Be Killed by Fire: The German Freedom Library and the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books as Agents of Cultural Memory

摘要

This article looks at two libraries founded in 1934 as counter-symbolsto the Nazi book burning: the German Freedom Library in Parisand the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books at the BrooklynJewish Center in New York. It describes these two libraries as agentsof cultural memory, as privileged sites for redefining German, German-Jewish, and Jewish-American cultural identity in times of radicalchange. Created on different continents and in different social,cultural, and political contexts, they reflect the dynamics of culturalmemory from 1933 through World War II and the Cold War era tothe present day.