They Burned the Books

A radio play by the Pulitzer Prize winning poet that suggests that the book burning in the Third Reich in May 1933 represents the destruction of human ideals and morality. The play depicts the burning of great works by Schiller, Heine, Freud, and Einstein, pointing out that the Nazis banned works for political and anti-Semitic reasons. The dead author Heine debates a representative Nazi and the play also depicts the censoring of a US teacher and the teaching of significant revolutionary moments in history should the Nazi take power in the US.