HolocaustMemorialMuseum .

In Washington, DC i spent 4 hours looking into various perspectives and side stories involving Nazi Germany. While in the Holocaust Memorial Museum , there was a showcase about Heinrich Heine, a poet whose radical political beliefs led to many of his works being banned by German authorities . Though he died before Nazi rule began, this quote carried the weight of the whole showcase.

"Where books are burned , in the end , people will be burned."
- Heinrich Heine .

Once i saw this, the first thing that came to my mind was CARNIval . The correlation between the two in senses of the similarities of burning books and the taking of human life immediately caught my attention. Its interesting to think of how the context of the play could have been changed simply to a group in hiding in Germany during the Nazi era . Forced to enclose themselves in the basement of an abandoned library, the group of teenagers struggle to survive due to the chance of death waiting for them outside the library vs. the chance of death from staying within. Caroline could be an example of someone who escaped a death camp or even is just running to seek shelter from the Nazis. The realization of the Nazi's taking over completely would give them less of a will to survive, knowing that they had no chance out there, and the realization of the current living conditions, they had no chance of survival inside either.
Aside from the change in context of the play, the quote itself is interesting enough to hold a conversation. Within books, we have everything that the human race needs to thrive aside from human contact itself. Books are sources of imagination, information, and everything else about our world or whatever came before. As soon as you destroy books , we lose our primary information source of what keeps us rooted to generations before us, fictional and non-fictional . When books are burned, people will be burned because how is the human race supposed to benefit from the diminution of all that we are known to be aside from human contact itself.