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The Battle Line at Louvain
“Where they burn books, they will also burn people” — Heinrich Heine
I’ve written before about the book burning ceremonies ( “bücherverbrennung”) that the Nazi Party arranged in 1933 following their seizure of power and passing of the Berufsbeamtengesetz(“Law for the Restoration of the Professsional Civil Service”) dismissing public servants from German Universities (see essay below). As described in an August 28th article in the The Times, Louvain was indeed the “Oxford of Belgium”, “the most celebrated seat of learning in the Low Countries” which,within a mere ten hours, had been “committed to the flames by the ruthless barbarians who have set forth to spread German culture throughout the globe”. Among those who did sign the document and remained proud to endorse it was Wilhelm Wien, a renowned German physicist and professor in Würzburg who three years prior had won the Nobel Prize in Physics “for his discoveries regarding the laws governing the radiation of heat”.
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