Arbeit macht frei

master has assigned boot an essay to write twelve inches on the phrase 'Arbeit macht frei.' so boot is writing this because master told him to. boot will try to write bigger so that everyone can see it, because master said he wants boot to show that he is smart.

boot doesnt speak German so went to the library and asked for help. master told boot to ask hermione but she wasnt available so boot asked Madam Pince. (She didnt think boot should be in library looking at books but she let him once boot explained that it was assignment from master.)

the words in German mean 'work brings freedom' or 'work makes free.' boot thinks it is the idea that if you work hard and sacrifice then you will be rewarded with the best kind of reward at all: that you will be your own master and nobody else can tell you what to do. dont know who would give you that reward, exactly. or is it something you claim for yourself because no one can give it to you? also not sure exactly how it works. what kind of work would it be, that gives you freedom? is it any kind of work, like in the fields for masters, or putting out props for transfiguration classes? would it be work for the people who make you not-free in the first place? or is it working for yourself, your own purposes? is that what makes you so nobody can tell you what to do?

the frase phrase seems to have first appired appeared in 1872, when a man in Germany named Lorenz Diefenbach wrote a book and gave it that title. (He was friends with Joseph Grimm, who collected fairy tales that a lot of Muggles know.) The Hogwarts library doesnt seem to have a copy of Lorenz Diefenback's book, and any way boot couldnt read German, but he found a general discription description of it in another book, which said, 'The main hero of the novel, through regular work, arrives on the path of virtue.' am not sure what the path of virtue means. something to do with being good. so if youre good, you can get to being free? is that different from being good at working? Like being a good servant?

this book also said that this phrase became populer popular with the Weimar government. (Didnt know what the Weimar government was, but Madam Pince knows all about it, and showed boot a textbook used for Muggle Studies.) the Weimar government used 'Arbeit macht frei' as a slogan, starting in 1928, when they talked about having policies to stop unemp stop unemploi to keep people working. The government that came after the Weimar government, the Nazi party, decided to keep using the phrase, too, when they seized the power to run the country. in fact, the Nazis put that phrase over the entrances to the camps that they set up to imprison people that they didnt like. like it was promising the people who came to those camps that if they worked hard, everything would be good for them. Thats why Madam Pince knew about it, because of course the Nazi party is what everyone learns about in Muggle studies, that Muggles are terrible and horrible because they did horrible things. Like the Nazis did. putting people into camps. And killing them. The Nazis put 'Arbeit macht frei' over the entrance of their camps but it was a lie. work in the Nazi camp didnt make anyone free. they just died. thats why wizards are better than muggles because they would never do anything like the Nazis did.

here is a picture of the words over the gate of one of those German camps





this is written with boots own hand.