1. Public book-burning by the Nazis Getty Image

2. Bebelplatz (Berlin) Bebelplatz on Unter den Linden was designed by Frederick the Great a great patron of the arts.

3. Bebelplatz (Berlin) Bebelplatz on Unter den Linden was designed by Frederick the Great a great patron of the arts. It was the site of the notorious Nazi book burning event, organized by the minister for propaganda and public enlightenment Goebbels.

4. Bebelplatz (Berlin) Bebelplatz on Unter den Linden was designed by Frederick the Great a great patron of the arts. It was the site of the notorious Nazi book burning event, organized by the minister for propaganda and public enlightenment Goebbels. More than 20,000 books written by Jews, Communists and others, including Marx, Freud, Mann, and Heine, were burned

6. The Bebelplatz monument is a plastic transparent window set into the ground

9. The public burning of “un-Germanic” books by members of the SA (Sturmabteilung, or “Assault Division,” a Nazi paramilitary organization) and university students in Berlin in May 1933. © Hulton Getty/Stone Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is set in a future where all books are burned, in a dystopic twist of irony, by firemen. Hearing the word “book-burning” immediately calls to mind images of censorship, fundamentalist sects and repressive regimes from different periods of history: the Roman Catholic Church’s Inquisitions, Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and here in the Philippines the US-backed Marcos dictatorship, among others.