Stadttheater Ingolstadt, Ingolstadt, Germany

„Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life.“

More than 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant named the opposing pair of "heteronomy" and "free will." For him, the only way to leave behind heteronomy and to become truly free was through self-reflection—that is, through thinking. Only when each individual engages in this process can a true sense of community arise. For Friedrich Schiller, art—or more precisely, beauty—seemed a suitable path toward this goal. Art can become a means of leading human beings from a limited existence to an absolute one.

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Ray Bradbury saw the great power of literature precisely in this: that readers, through literature, can rise above themselves. Good literature prompts us to think, to reflect, and to question everything we believe we know about reality. He identified a fundamental problem in the fact that we are reading less and less of such literature.

Bradbury understood his novel Fahrenheit 451 as a warning against the triviality and hedonistic promises of happiness offered by entertainment media—especially television—which paralyze our thinking by preempting and simplifying content. The distractions caused by television and social media continue to increase. Independent thinking is increasingly pushed aside in favor of pre-digested categories. Not without reason, television was mockingly referred to as the "idiot box" from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Shortly after the novel's publication, Ray Bradbury also came under government scrutiny. U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy had launched a large-scale campaign against communists and homosexuals in government institutions and public life. Intellectuals, artists, and writers in particular fell victim to this "Red Scare." Bradbury, who openly criticized U.S. politics, fit perfectly into this enemy image. However, he repeatedly emphasized that he did not want the novel to be understood as a critique of censorship by governments. His main criticism was directed at the censorship that originated from the citizens themselves, restricting diversity of opinion under the pretext of decency or propriety. Bradbury never referred to himself as a science fiction author, because for him, the things he wrote about did not lie in some distant, undefined future—they were already waiting just around the corner. In 1960, only seven years after the novel’s release, Ray Bradbury wrote:

"When I wrote the short novel Fahrenheit 451, I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, one evening in Beverly Hills, a man and a woman walked past me with their dog. I stood there, staring after them, stunned. The woman held in one hand a small radio, about the size of a cigarette pack, with a trembling antenna. Tiny copper wires ran from it to a delicate cone that fit into her right ear. There she went, oblivious to man and dog alike, listening to distant winds, whispers, and soap opera cries, sleepwalking through the streets, guided by a husband who might as well not have been there. This was no fiction."

In the play, Professor Faber says: "It’s not the books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books." It is our responsibility to choose carefully which information we take from which medium, and to stand up for freedom of thought and independent thinking. This also means not falling for propaganda and populism, and continually questioning our own opinions and ideas.