Heinrich Heine Warned The World

Heinrich Heine was one of Germany's great poets and writers. In the early 1820s Heine wrote a play, "Almansor," and that play contains the line, "Where one burns books, in the end, one will also burn people" (German: ,,Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen"). Of course, this was long before the Nazi nutcase Hitler, or his propaganda henchman Joseph Goebbels, or the other Nazi nutcases, or those who became complicit in the terrible crimes against humanity by offering support or silence to the hatred and viciousness, even though they certainly knew better. 

 

Heine's works, as well as the works of many others, like Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Hermann Hesse, Victor Hugo, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and many others were burned on the Berlin Opernplatz in 1933 (Opernplatz=Plaza/Square of the Opera; in reference to, the State Opera located there, which was renamed "Bebelplatz" after World War Two). Heinrich Heine was a German Jew who later converted to Christianity (Lutheranism). 

 

Public domain photo of a portrait of Heinrich Heine from Wikipedia (original portrait by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim of Germany)

WORD HISTORY: 

Nascent-This word is related to "gene," a word of Greek derivation borrowed by English via German, to "general," a Latin-derived word borrowed by English from Latin-based Old French, but with some Latin influence and reinforcement (initially borrowed in its adjectival form, then later, also borrowed from French in its noun form for a high ranking military officer), and to "nation," another Latin-derived word borrowed into English from French, and it is distantly related to "kin" and to "kind" (noun and adjective), from the Germanic roots of English. "Nascent" goes back to the Indo European root "gen(e)," which meant "to produce, to give birth, to conceive, to beget, to have offspring." This gave its Old Italic offspring "gnascor/gnaskor," meaning "to be born,"^ which then produced the altered infinitive form "nasci," "to be born," and its present participle form "nascens," meaning "being born, springing from, being produced;" thus in a figurative sense, "coming into existence," also used adjectivally. Borrowed by English as the adjective "nascent" in the mid 1620s and meaning, "being born, coming into existence, emerging." 

 

^ See "Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages" (Volume 7 of the Leiden Indo-European Etymological Series, by Michiel de Vaan, Brill (Publishing), Leiden (Netherlands), Boston (U.S.), 2008.