#1413 - Robert Darnton

Robert Darnton is an American cultural historian and academic librarian who specializes in 18th-century France. He was director of the Harvard University Library from 2007 to 2016. Bob joins me to talk about one of his many books called "Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature" about Communist East Germany and censorship, a component of the party program to engineer society. Behind the unmarked office doors of Ninety Clara-Zetkin Street in East Berlin, censors developed annual plans for literature in negotiation with high party officials and prominent writers. A system so pervasive that it lodged inside the authors’ heads as self-censorship, it left visible scars in the nation’s literature.