# Heinrich Heine **Heinrich Heine** (1797–1856) was a German Romantic poet, essayist and critic. Born into a Jewish family in Düsseldorf, he spent the last twenty-five years of his life in Paris, where he moved after Prussian censors suppressed his work. He appears in this knowledge base for a single line, written in his tragedy *Almansor* in the early 1820s and set in the burning of Arabic books after the fall of Granada: where they burn books, he wrote, they will in the end burn people. A little over a century later Heine's own books were among those thrown on the fires during the Nazi book burnings of May 1933 — which is why the line is quoted as prophecy rather than as metaphor, and why it recurs whenever a government takes an interest in which books may be read. ## Connections - [[World War II Timeline]] — the 1933 book burnings, where his work went onto the fires - [[Book Banning Timeline]] — where the line is used as the through-line from 1933 to the present - [[Karl Marx]] — a contemporary and Paris acquaintance, burned in the same 1933 fires