When Books Went to War (2 page)

The initial destruction was interrupted only briefly, so that one of the student organizers could deliver a speech about the purpose for the gathering. To ensure the purity of German literature, he said, it was necessary to burn all “un-German” books and documents that threatened the national movement of Nazi unity. This included all works by Jewish authors, for “the Jew, who is powerful in intellect, but weak in blood . . . remains without understanding in the presence of German thought, fails to dignify it and, therefore, is bound to injure the German spirit.” The extermination of these offensive volumes would make the nation stronger by ridding it of ideas antagonistic to Germany's progress. When the book burning resumed, another student announced the names of authors whose books were being destroyed, and explained why their ideas were harmful to Germany. Sigmund Freud was denounced for falsifying German history and degrading its great figures. Emil Ludwig was criticized for his “literary rascality and high treason against Germany.” Erich Maria Remarque was condemned for denigrating the German language and the nation's ideals.
Author after author was named. Book after book was burned, and the crowd cheered as if they were watching a sporting event. And so it continued for hours into the night.

Although it had been rumored that the book burning was solely orchestrated by an overzealous student organization, it became clear that it was done with the blessing of the Nazi Party when Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, the “Minister of Public Enlightenment,” arrived to make a speech. Goebbels oversaw the Reich Chamber of Culture, which regulated Germany's literature, press, radio, theater, music, art, and film. He used his influence to mold German society to suit Hitler's ideology. Goebbels was wary of politically progressive authors who championed such causes as pacifism, socialism, reform, and sexual freedom. Books that so much as hinted at such themes were condemned to the flames.

When Goebbels ascended the swastika-draped rostrum, he declared that “Jewish intellectualism is dead” and that “national socialism has hewn the way.” Gesturing toward the scene before him, he continued:

 

The German folk soul can again express itself. These flames do not only illuminate the final end of the old era, they also light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past. If the old men do not understand what is going on, let them grasp that we young . . . men have gone and done it.

The old goes up in flames, the new shall be fashioned from the flame of our hearts.

 

After Goebbels's speech, the song “The Nation to Arms” punctuated the night air and the students again took to throwing books into the mountain of fire.

To ensure that Berlin's book burning would have a wide audience, it was broadcast live over the radio and filmed. Movie theaters across Germany soon showed footage of Berlin's bonfire with commentary explaining that harmful books eroded German values and must be destroyed. As this message spread, ninety-three additional book burnings were held, each attracting a large audience and intense media coverage. The students of Kiel University assembled two thousand examples of literature considered harmful to the German spirit, built a giant bonfire, and invited the public to watch as they burned the offensive books. In Munich, students led a picturesque torchlight parade before collecting one hundred massive volumes from the university library to be publicly burned. At another event in Munich, five thousand schoolchildren gathered to burn Marxist literature, and were urged that “as you watch the fire burn these un-German books, let it also burn into your hearts love of the Fatherland.” In Breslau, five thousand pounds of heretical works were destroyed in a single day.

As book burnings spread across Germany, the Nazis also targeted any individuals who harbored anti-Nazi sympathies. Those suspected of entertaining views harmful to Germany were subjected to house searches; if anything objectionable was found, the offenders were punished. Some were never seen again. Quiet hysteria spread; many people preemptively destroyed documents and books that might be problematic. According to one report, when a local woman was given a tip that she should make sure her home was “really clean,” she “immediately burned [her] books and papers and the next day endured a search.” Nazis published lists of books fit for burning; among the authors named were Karl Marx, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Heinrich Mann, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Arthur Schnitzler.

Helen Keller wrote an impassioned letter to the student body of Germany, expressing her shock and disbelief that the birthplace of the printing press had become a crematory for this invention's posterity. “History has taught you nothing, if you think you can kill ideas,” she scolded. “Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.” “You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds,” she said.

Others joined Keller in censuring the youth of Germany. Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis denounced the book burnings, stating the works being destroyed were some of the “noblest books produced by Germany in the last twenty years.” He added that the authors whose writings were thrown into the flames “should feel nothing save satisfaction at receiving this unintentional tribute from an organized mob.” In London, H.  G. Wells gave a defiant speech on intolerance, echoing some of the same sentiments as Keller. Book burnings “had never yet destroyed a book,” Wells said, as “books once printed have a vitality exceeding any human being, and they go on speaking as though nothing had happened.” “It seems to me,” he went on, “that what is happening in Germany is a clumsy lout's revolution against thought, sanity and books.” Although he admitted that he did not feel safe in England, and believed that authors could one day be lynched or sent to concentration camps because of the perceived danger their books presented, he found comfort in a single idea. “In the long run,” he said, “books will win, and the louts will be brought to heel, and sane judgment will settle with all the braying and bawling heroics of these insurgents.” In the meantime, Wells protested Germany's actions by providing a refuge for endangered titles. With the cooperation of other authors, Wells established the Library of Burned Books, which opened in Paris in the spring of 1934. The library housed copies of all books banned or burned by the Nazis, and held in safekeeping writings and books donated by German refugees and anyone who felt their books might be at risk.

American editorialists also voiced their disapproval. It seemed incongruous that universities, which had long been a chief glory of Germany, had become one of her shames, one newspaper said. The
New York Times
dubbed Germany's actions a “literary holocaust,” commenting that “such an exhibition of the new national spirit, silly and shameful as it seems, bespeaks a mass-movement plainly touched with insanity.”
Time
magazine referred to the incident as a “bibliocaust” and reported the ghastly details, including how a band played Chopin's “Funeral March” as books were cast into a bonfire in the Romerberg, Frankfurt's medieval marketplace. Many Americans gathered in public protests—eighty thousand in New York, fifty thousand in Chicago, and twenty thousand in Philadelphia.

 

How could Germany, an educated nation renowned for its philosophers and thinkers, tolerate the purging of its libraries and the destruction of its books? These acts were not isolated events, but rather one piece of a carefully orchestrated plan devised by Adolf Hitler to manipulate German culture in accordance with his policies and dogmas. Once he gained power, Hitler passed laws to ensure obedience to the new order he was establishing. For example, in 1935
Mein Kampf
became state-sanctioned reading; a copy was gifted to every couple who married, and it was used as a textbook in every German school.

The führer's involvement in transforming Germany's cultural institutions to bolster his policies extended far beyond books. Hitler worked to create the impression that only pureblooded Germans had made culturally and artistically significant contributions worthy of display in museums. He founded a new holiday, the Day of German Art. As the presider over the day's festivities, he selected which artworks would be exhibited, and awarded top honors to pieces he deemed ideologically appropriate. Thereafter, he dictated where each work would be displayed within galleries, and set the value of each creation. The pieces that reinforced his vision of Germany were displayed prominently, and their price tags were correspondingly high. Museums were similarly “purified” by Hitler and Goebbels, as they forbade the display of pieces created by Jews or others considered to be inferior to full-blooded Germans. By exhibiting only those works that would herald the accomplishments of the Aryan race, Hitler aimed to give the impression that only they were capable of bringing glory to Germany.

Education was reorganized to reflect Hitler's ideology. On the same day as the Berlin book burning, Dr. Wilhelm Frick, Germany's minister of the interior, lectured German school administrators on changes to the educational system. He mandated that students be instructed on “everything concerning the fatherland and German history—with special emphasis on the last twenty years” and on “race science, heredity and genealogy.” As to the latter, Frick explained that schools must “consistently emphasize that the infiltration of the German people with alien blood, especially Jewish and Negro, must be absolutely prevented,” and that lessons on “race biology must also bring out mental and spiritual differences between the different races and must bring home to pupils the dangers of race deterioration.” Under Frick's guidelines, children were instructed that pureblooded Germans were a superior race. Concomitantly, Jewish and left-leaning lecturers were dismissed from their employment; at some schools, vacancies ran as high as 33 percent.

Hitler also exploited radio and film to disperse his ideas to even the remotest places. Radio broadcasting was considered an efficient means of publicizing, and ensuring obedience to, the führer's dictates. Goebbels endeavored to make inexpensive radios available to the masses so that families across Germany could listen to Hitler's messages. German movie studios were pressured to produce entertaining films containing propaganda, and Hitler and Goebbels personally worked with producers to see that their vision for Germany was adequately reflected on the big screen. Goebbels wielded enormous power; he approved scripts, prevented “un-German” films from being made, and determined whether completed films were worthy of being shown. When the public criticized the dull, propaganda-laden films offered in German cinemas, Goebbels blamed movie critics for planting such ideas in their reviews. In 1936, film criticism was outlawed.

By 1938, the Nazis had banned eighteen categories of books, 4,175 titles, and the complete works of 565 authors, many of whom were Jewish. Yet some Jewish authors remained on bookshelves, to the utter frustration of the Nazis. German newspapers published furious missives censuring institutions that allowed the continued influence of Jewish writers.
German librarians were forced to carefully comb through their collections and ensure that every book inimical to Hitler's policies was eliminated.

In that year, Nazi policies moved from books to people. On October 18, 1938, Hitler deported over twelve thousand Polish Jews from Germany. Yet only four thousand were allowed to enter Poland, leaving thousands stranded on the German-Polish border. When Herschel Grynszpan, a young Jew living in France, learned that his family was among those languishing on the border without food or shelter, he stormed into the German embassy in Paris and, in a fit of rage, fatally shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on November 7, 1938.

The incident spawned an anti-Semitic wave of terrorism across Germany. By November 9, news of the assassination had spread, and violent anti-Jewish demonstrations erupted in Berlin. Squads of young men roamed the city, breaking store windows with metal batons and weapons. Shops were emptied, merchandise was thrown into the streets, and looters descended like vultures. The
New York Times
reported that gangs of young Germans, who appeared to be officials or members of the Nazi Party, vandalized Jewish-owned businesses as onlookers joked and laughed. By the following day at least ninety-one Jews had been killed. Almost all Jewish businesses in Berlin were gutted. Eleven synagogues were burned, countless temple books and Torah scrolls were destroyed, and thousands of Jews were imprisoned, sent to concentration camps, or driven to suicide.
November 9, 1938, became known as the Night of the Broken Glass—Kristallnacht.

As the foreign press demanded answers and details, Goebbels stepped forward to set the record straight. The
New York Times
reported that he “openly sanctioned the wave of terrorism, destruction and incendiarism that swept over Germany,” and even promised that “there would be further anti-Jewish laws for a comprehensive solution of the Jewish problem in a manner that will equalize the status of the Jews in Germany in conformity with popular anti-Semitic sentiment.” “The reaction of the German people to the cowardly murder in Paris” signified “the nation follow[ing] its healthy instincts,” Goebbels said. He confessed that he sympathized with the rioters and vowed to silence all foreign criticism by threatening that Germany's Jews would pay the price for any lies and exaggerations published overseas. As for the victims of the attacks, Goebbels said: “If I were a Jew . . . I would remain silent. There is only one thing the Jew can do—shut up and say nothing further about Germany.”

Kristallnacht provoked little outrage within Germany. Hitler's policies beginning in the late 1920s had paved the way for acquiescence of such blatant persecution. After years of devaluing Jewish contributions to German society and culture, the Nazis had created a climate where violence against Jews was generally condoned.