Stumbled on an old library card catalog in Prague that listed books removed by the Nazis in the 1940s

Found it in a small archive room at the Clementinum while my tour guide was distracted, and the handwritten notes next to each title like 'banned 1942' gave me a weird chill since those books were literally pulled off shelves and burned. Has anyone else run into original records of book censorship from that era?

3 comments

3 Comments

pat_park4d ago

Actually I gotta push back on this a little. Those records exist but people act like the Nazis were the only ones banning books and thats just not true. The Catholic Church had their own Index of Forbidden Books going back centuries before Hitler even showed up. And in the US we had the Comstock laws that banned all kinds of literature well into the 1900s. Even today schools and libraries ban books all the time, people just get upset about different things now. What I'm saying is these records are important but we shouldnt pretend it was some unique evil that only happened in one place or one time. Its more like a pattern that keeps repeating.

fiona_sullivan293d ago

So are we gonna build a time machine and yell at everybody who ever banned a book?

grant.jason1d ago

But @pat_park, doesn't finding those cards change how we feel about this repeating pattern since they're right where the books were taken?