Irish Independent
May 2, 2009 Saturday

The night of the burning books

In 1933, the Nazis tried to extinguish an era of Jewish
intellectualism by torching the works of more than 100 authors. But
did this act of terror actually succeed’ The answer can be found in a
new book, says Richard Morrison

By midnight on that startling evening the flames from the bonfires
were leaping ten yards into the air. Thousands had gathered. Joseph
Goebbels had already spoken, proclaiming the end of "the age of
exaggerated Jewish intellectualism". But still the books burnt,
thousands of them. And not just here on the Opernplatz in Berlin, but
in cities across Germany. By the end of the night a nation had
voluntarily consigned to the flames the best works of its finest
living writers.

The date — May 10, 1933 — is now as infamous in the annals of Nazi
tyranny as the Night of the Long Knives the following year, or
Kristallnacht in 1938. All are seen as symbolic and horrific
milestones on the road to genocide. But who chose the authors whose
books were to be so publicly burnt and whose reputations were
instantaneously trashed? Why were some pro-Nazi writers included? And
what became of the authors in the aftermath’

Until now, the answers have been sketchy at best. But a gripping new
book, just out in Germany, tackles these matters with tenacity and
brilliance. "I realised I had to write it the first time I saw the
list of authors whose books were burnt," says Volker Weidermann, the
young journalist who has written Das Buch der verbranntem Bücher (The
Book of the Burning Books).

"I’ve studied German literature of that period and I read books for my
living [he is literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Sonntagszeitung]. Yet of the 100-odd German names on the list, I
hadn’t heard of half of them. I thought: ‘Who were these authors? And
were they so bad that, even now, they don’t deserve to have their
books read”

"So I started tracking down the books on the 1933 list, and reading
them."

That wasn’t easy. Weidermann found some titles advertised on the
internet. "Even 10 years ago, such a search would have been
impossible." Some he discovered in antiquarian bookshops in Berlin,
Heidelberg and Darmstadt, "though I felt incredibly lucky if I came
across a volume by pure chance".

And then, almost as he had completed his Herculean quest, he came
across an old man who held the key to the whole mystery: a book
collector living near Munich who had spent all his life and money
collecting 15,000 first editions of these banned books.

"He’s now over 80 and desperate for a public library to take on his
collection — but so far none has agreed. It would be a tragedy if
these books were lost all over again."

What Weidermann discovered when he opened all these banned books
astonished him. "There are at least four or five of these banned
authors whose books, in my opinion, are forgotten masterpieces. People
such as Maria Leitner, who was terrifically courageous; even when
banned she kept returning to Germany to write reports that were
published abroad. She disappeared in 1941.

Or Armin Wegner, who wrote brilliant eyewitness accounts about the
slaughter of the Armenians in Turkey. In 1933 he actually wrote an
open letter to Hitler, explaining why the Jews were important for
Germany. It was an amazingly brave thing to do. It took just a week or
two after that before they found him, imprisoned him and tortured
him."

Weidermann concedes that there are also badly written books among
those consigned to the flames. "But as Joseph Roth wrote: ‘I hold all
the writers whose books were burnt in high esteem, because the fire
has purified them and ennobled them.’ And for any book by the banned
131 authors to have survived the Nazi bonfire is a little triumph:
evidence that someone, somewhere, was resisting tyranny."

Buthow did the book burning on May 10 come about’ At this stage the
Nazis were far from confident, despite the general pro-Hitler
euphoria, about how quickly they could impose their anti-Semitic
policies. Only a month earlier a boycott of Jewish shops organised by
the regime had failed embarrassingly.

Instead it was university students who played the leading role in
getting the books burnt. As Weidermann points out: "To support the
Nazis in the early 1930s was an act of rebellion. You were rebelling
against all the confusion of the Weimar Republic, against the
humiliating Treaty of Versailles and in favour of a strong, united,
nationalist Germany."

In April 1933, the Nazi Students’ League called for the "public
burning of subversive Jewish writings by university students in
response to the shameless anti-German smear campaign conducted by
international Jewry". These bonfires, in university cities throughout
Germany, were to include material seized from university and public
libraries, as well as bookshops and private collections.

Astonishingly, there was virtually no opposition either from
booksellers or university professors. Many academics seemed as
enthusiastic about the book burning as their students. Cologne
University announced that "the Senate and Rector have decided to
attend the occasion. Dress: dark suit".

But who would draw up this first list of banned books’ After all, it
wasn’t just a matter of including Jewish authors (who comprised only
40 per cent of the list). The Nazis were also keen to suppress the
pacifists and communists who had dominated the Berlin avant-garde café
scene in the 1920s. The task demanded someone who had read a lot, who
knew the literary scene, and yet was firmly fascist. In short, it
needed a Nazi librarian. Step forward, Wolfgang Herrmann.

The ambitious, 25-year-old Herrmann was already giving lectures on
"Nazi librarianship" back in 1929, when he was still handing out fines
for overdue books in Breslau Municipal Library. By 1932 he was drawing
up lists of "good books" (staunchly nationalist ones) for German
libraries. Responding to a request by the militant students, he
quickly wrote down the titles of books by 131 undesirable authors.

His choice was extraordinary. Several American authors, including
Ernest Hemingway, were on the list. So, even more inexplicably, were
three or four pro-Nazi German authors. "Clearly Hermann used his big
moment to bring down some people in the literary world that he simply
didn’t like," Weidermann says.

But Hermann himself was soon brought down. A year or two earlier he
had penned the true but incautious observation that Hitler’s Mein
Kampf contained "no intellectually original and theoretically
well-developed ideas". Hermann’s review of Mein Kampf was dredged up
amidst vicious infighting in the Nazis’ ranks. His career never
recovered. He joined the German Army and was killed in 1945.

The Nazi leadership was horribly emboldened by May 10. As Goebbels
admitted in his speech at the Berlin bonfire, the party hierarchy was
astonished that "so swift and radical a clearance could be carried out
in Germany".

Without any coercion, the German public had watched with apparent
delight as the books of superstar authors went up in smoke. The Nazi
leaders gleefully took note. Within a year, similar purges were being
instigated in concert life, opera houses, theatres and art galleries.

There was utter disbelief, too, among the writers whose books were
burnt — mingled with dismay, fear or plain bewilderment. "My books
are burning at the stake in front of the university where I used to
address thousands of people!" wrote Stefan Zweig to his friend Romain
Rolland. "And not a single German writer is protesting at this
auto-da-fé. Not even in private letters."

"Some writers," Weidermann says, "were far-sighted enough to sense
what would happen in Germany, right up to the war and the
Holocaust. Others had no conception of what was going on, or its
repercussions. Some authors immediately emigrated, but many didn’t."

One way or another, however, an entire generation of German authors
was silenced, many permanently. "Just 20 per cent of the 131 writers
whose works were burnt that night survived the next 12 years of
Hitler’s regime," Weidermann says. "Many killed themselves, often in
exile. Some, like Maria Leitner, probably starved to death. With
others, we just don’t know. Those were years in which people simply
disappeared."

And for those who did survive till 1945, there was one last, bitter
pill to swallow. "Many of the famous authors returning to Germany
after the war were devastated to find that there was no audience for
them," Weidermann says. "The public that had burnt their books in 1933
still didn’t want them! That was utterly humiliating for someone like
Thomas Mann, who thought that there was a ‘better Germany’ that would
welcome him back."

And by then, of course, a new tyranny was rising in the East. New in
political complexion, but similar in its attitude to literary
freedom. "During my research," Weidermann says, "I found a list in an
antiquarian bookshop of the thousands of books banned by the East
German authorities in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the authors were
the same ones that had books burnt by the Nazis."

The faces had changed; but the persecution went on.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress