Others are recalling the burning of "un-German" books by the Nazis during the Holocaust, the ancient Roman burning of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and the burning of Harry Potter and other books ...

On May 10, 1933, university students in 34 university towns across Germany burned over 25,000 books.

The book didn’t go down well in Germany, at least not at first. “People said my depiction of Hanna Schmitz was too human,” he says. But that, he insists, missed the point.