In another life I worked in Germany and studied German literature. On my bookshelf are a couple of books by Jenny Erpenbeck; one is a parable about racism and asylum seekers, another is the story of various generations living in a particular house on a lake outside Berlin throughout both Nazism and East German totalitarianism.
Today I was reminded of the great similarities between Republican book and curriculum bans throughout the red states and those in Nazi Germany — and I don't invoke the Nazi analogy lightly. Both the Nazis of 1933 and their ideological descendants detested and silenced minorities, gays, and Leftists. Both created lists of "rejected" books and banned topics (Liste des schädlichen und unerwünchten Schriftums).
On the list of banned authors created by Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda Josef Goebbels — alongside Marx, Engels, Freud, Aldous Huxley and John DosPassos and a thousand more — was the name Fritz Erpenbeck. Further down the same list was Hedda Zinner, another banned leftist.
Naturally, the name Erpenbeck rang a bell and so I checked. Both Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner were Jenny Erpenbeck's grandparents. Her wonderful book Heimsuchung (Visitation) made all the more sense to me in retrospect.
We were reminded again — just today — that censorship comes at us also from the Liberal center-right. Julian Assange, who published documentation of American war crimes, is now one step closer to being extradited to the United States by a Democratic DOJ. With one notable and admirable exception, Democrats want to modify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to empower content carriers like Facebook to do more censoring with impunity — while Republicans want to modify the bill to provide more online opportunities to misinform, wage their culture war battles, and freely sell military grade weapons. (Sigh).
None of this is good for democracy.