"Where books are burned, human
beings are destined to be burned too."
- Heinrich Heine
On this date, 10 May
1933, in Germany, the Nazis stage massive public book burnings. I will post
information about this event from Wikipedia and other links.
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Opernplatz, Berlin
book burnings
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The Nazi book burnings were a
campaign conducted by the German Student Union to ceremonially burn
books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted
for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies
opposed to Nazism.
These included books written by Jewish pacifist, classical liberal, anarchist, socialist,
and communist
authors, among others.
The book-burning campaign
On
April 8, 1933, the Main Office for Press
and Propaganda
of the German Student Union proclaimed a nationwide
"Action against the Un-German Spirit", which was to climax in a
literary purge or "cleansing" ("Säuberung") by fire. Local
chapters were to supply the press with releases and commissioned articles,
sponsor well-known Nazi figures to speak at public gatherings, and
negotiate for radio broadcast time. On the 8th of April, the Student Union also
drafted the Twelve Theses which deliberately evoked Martin
Luther and the historic burning of "Un-German" books at the Wartburg
festival on the 300th anniversary of the posting of Luther's Ninety-Five Theses. The theses called for a
"pure" national language and culture. Placards publicized the theses,
which attacked "Jewish intellectualism", asserted the need to
"purify" German language and literature, and demanded that
universities be centres of German nationalism.
The students described the "action" as a response to a worldwide
Jewish "smear campaign" against Germany and an affirmation of
traditional German values.
On
10 May 1933, in an act of ominous significance, the students burned
upwards of 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books, thereby presaging an
era of uncompromising state censorship. In many university towns, nationalist
students marched in torch lit parades against the "un-German" spirit.
The scripted rituals of this night called for high Nazi officials, professors,
rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. At the
meeting places, students threw the pillaged, banned books into the bonfires
with a great joyous ceremony that included live music, singing, "fire
oaths," and incantations. In Berlin, some 40,000 people gathered in the square at the
State Opera to hear Joseph Goebbels deliver a fiery address: "No
to decadence and moral corruption!" Goebbels enjoined the crowd. “Yes to
decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings
of Heinrich
Mann, Ernst Gläser, Erich
Kästner.”
The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path...The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. As a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death - this is the task of this young generation. And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed - a deed which should document the following for the world to know - Here the intellectual foundation of the November Republic is sinking to the ground, but from this wreckage the phoenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise.— Joseph Goebbels, Speech to the students in Berlin
Not
all book burnings took place on 10 May as the German Student Union had planned.
Some were postponed a few days because of rain. Others, based on local chapter
preference, took place on 21 June, the summer
solstice, a traditional date of celebration. Nonetheless, in 34 university
towns across Germany the "Action against the Un-German Spirit" was a
success, enlisting widespread newspaper coverage. And in some places, notably
Berlin, radio broadcasts brought the speeches, songs, and ceremonial
incantations "live" to countless German listeners.
All
of the following types of literature were to be banned.
- The works of traitors, emigrants and authors from foreign countries who believe they can attack and denigrate the new Germany (H.G. Wells, Rolland);
- The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism;
- Pacifist literature;
- Literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes, and writings supporting the Weimar Republic (Rathenau, Heinrich Mann);
- All historical writings whose purpose is to denigrate the origin, the spirit and the culture of the German Volk, or to dissolve the racial and structural order of the Volk, or that denies the force and importance of leading historical figures in favor of egalitarianism and the masses, and which seeks to drag them through the mud (Emil Ludwig);
- Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Hackel, Benedict);
- Books that advocate “art” which is decadent, bloodless, or purely constructivist (Grosz, Dix, Bauhaus, Mendelsohn);
- Writings on sexuality and sexual education which serve the egocentric pleasure of the individual and thus, completely destroy the principles of race and Volk (Hirschfeld);
- The decadent, destructive and Volk-damaging writings of “Asphalt and Civilization” literati: (Graf, H. Mann, Stefan Zweig, Wassermann, Franz Blei);
- Literature by Jewish authors, regardless of the field;
- Popular entertainment literature that depicts life and life’s goals in a superficial, unrealistic and sickly sweet manner, based on a bourgeois or upper class view of life;
- Nationalistic and patriotic kitsch in literature.
- Pornography and explicit literature by Jewish authors.
- All books degrading German purity.
Responses
The
blind writer Helen Keller published an Open Letter to German
Students: 'You may burn my books and the books of
the best minds in Europe, but the ideas those books contain have passed through
millions of channels and will go on.'”
Persecuted authors
Among
the German-speaking authors whose books student leaders burned that night were Walter
Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt
Brecht, Max
Brod, Otto
Dix, Alfred Döblin, Albert
Einstein, Friedrich Engels, Lion
Feuchtwanger, Marieluise Fleißer, Leonhard
Frank, Sigmund Freud, Iwan Goll,
George
Grosz, Jaroslav Hašek, Werner
Hegemann, Heinrich Heine, Ödön von Horvath, Heinrich Eduard Jacob, Franz
Kafka, Georg Kaiser, Erich
Kästner, Alfred Kerr, Egon Kisch,
Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Kraus, Theodor
Lessing, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Karl
Liebknecht, Georg Lukács, Rosa
Luxemburg, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann,
Ludwig
Marcuse, Karl
Marx, Robert Musil, Carl von Ossietzky, Erwin
Piscator, Alfred Polgar, Erich Maria Remarque, Ludwig
Renn, Joachim Ringelnatz, Joseph
Roth, Nelly Sachs, Felix
Salten, Anna Seghers, Arthur
Schnitzler, Carl Sternheim, Bertha von Suttner, Ernst
Toller, Kurt Tucholsky, Jakob
Wassermann, Frank Wedekind, Franz
Werfel, Grete Weiskopf, Arnold Zweig and Stefan
Zweig.
Not
only German-speaking authors were burned but also French authors like Victor
Hugo, André Gide, Romain
Rolland, Henri Barbusse, American writers such as Ernest
Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Theodore
Dreiser, Jack London, John
Dos Passos, and Helen Keller as well as English authors Joseph
Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells
and Aldous
Huxley, Irish writer James Joyce and Russian authors including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Maxim
Gorki, Isaac Babel, Vladimir
Lenin, Vladimir Nabokov, Leo
Tolstoy, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Ilya
Ehrenburg.
The
burning of the books represents a culmination of the persecution of those
authors whose verbal or written opinions were opposed to Nazi ideology. Many
artists, writers and scientists were banned from working and publication. Their
works could no longer be found in libraries or in the curricula of schools or
universities. Some of them were driven to exile (like Walter
Mehring and Arnold Zweig); others were deprived of their citizenship (for
example Ernst Toller and Kurt Tucholsky) or forced into a self-imposed exile
from society (e.g. Erich Kästner). For other writers the Nazi persecutions
ended in death. Some of them died in concentration camps, due to the
consequences of the conditions of imprisonment, or were executed (like Carl von
Ossietzky, Erich Mühsam, Gertrud
Kolmar, Jakob van Hoddis, Paul Kornfeld, Arno Nadel
and Georg Hermann, Theodor Wolff, Adam
Kuckhoff, and Rudolf Hilferding). Exiled authors despaired and
committed suicide, for example: Walter Hasenclever, Ernst
Weiss, Carl Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Toller, and
Stefan Zweig.
Heinrich
Heine, whose work was also burned, wrote in his 1820-1821 play Almansor
the famous admonition, “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende
auch Menschen": "Where they burn books, they
will in the end also burn people."
Denazification
Main
articles: Censorship in the Federal
Republic of Germany, Allied Occupation Zones in Germany
and Denazification
In
1946, the Allied occupation authorities drew up a list of over 30,000 titles,
ranging from school books to poetry and including works by such authors as von
Clausewitz. Millions of copies of these books were confiscated and
destroyed. The representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the
order in principle was no different from the Nazi book burnings.
Artworks
were under the same censorship as other media;
"all collections of works of art related or dedicated to the perpetuation of German militarism or Nazism will be closed permanently and taken into custody.".
The
directives were very broadly interpreted, leading to the destruction of
thousands of paintings and thousands more were shipped to deposits in the U.S.
Those confiscated paintings still surviving in U.S. custody include, for
example, a painting "depicting a couple of middle aged women talking in a
sunlit street in a small town".
Remembrance
Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book
Burnings is a
traveling exhibition produced by the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum. Through historical photographs, documents, and films, it
explores how the book burnings became a potent symbol in America’s battle
against Nazism and why they continue to resonate with the public—in film,
literature, and political discourse-—to this day. In 2014, this exhibition will
be displayed in West Fargo, North Dakota; Dallas, Texas; and Missoula, Montana.
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