As Heinrich Heine had noted over a century before, ‘Wherever books are burned, men also, in the end, are burned.’ Holocaust, of course, means ‘whole burning’. The book was published eight years after the end of the Second World War, and it is worth remembering that book-burnings were an important part of the early years of national socialism in Germany. The book was published in 1953 at the height of the McCarthy ‘witch hunts’ in the US, and this culture of suppression and censorship, as Bradbury himself attested, is what helped to inspire the book, even though its meaning encompasses more general concerns about book-burning and the tyranny and suppression which that act signifies.
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