- Nazi book burnings
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Book burning in Berlin, May 1933.
The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the authorities of Nazi Germany to ceremonially burn all books in Germany which did not correspond with Nazi ideology.
Contents
The book-burning campaign
Examples of books burned by the Nazis on display at Yad Vashem.On 6 April 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Association (de:Deutsche Studentenschaft) 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 8 April, the students association 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 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.
In a symbolic act of ominous significance, on 10 May 1933, the students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books, presaging an era of state censorship and control of culture. On the night of 10 May, in most university towns, nationalist students marched in torchlight parades "against the un-German spirit." The scripted rituals called for high Nazi officials, professors, rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. At the meeting places, students threw the pillaged and unwanted books into the bonfires with great joyous ceremony, band-playing, songs, "fire oaths," and incantations. In Berlin, some 40,000 people gathered in the Opernplatz 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 Association 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.[citation needed] And in some places, notably Berlin, radio broadcasts brought the speeches, songs, and ceremonial incantations "live" to countless German listeners.
Among the authors whose books student leaders burned that night numbered well-known socialists such as Bertolt Brecht and August Bebel; the founder of the concept of communism, Karl Marx; critical “bourgeois” writers like the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler, and “corrupting foreign influences,” among them American authors Ernest Hemingway, Jack London and Helen Keller, English writer H. G. Wells; and notable Jewish authors such as Franz Werfel, Max Brod, and Stefan Zweig. Especially notable among those works burned were the writings of beloved nineteenth-century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who 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
Memorial for book burning in 1933; in the ground of Römerberg Square in front of Frankfurt city hall, Hesse, Germany.
Book burning memorial at the Bebelplatz in Berlin.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.[1]
Artworks were under the same censorship as other media;
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- "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".[2]
Cinematography
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade depicts a presentation of the Burning of the Books, where Adolf Hitler is found gracing the occasion.
See also
List of authors whose books were burnt
This literature-related list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.- Isaak Babel
- Henri Barbusse
- Walter Benjamin
- Ernst Bloch
- Bertolt Brecht
- Max Brod
- Otto Dix
- Alfred Döblin
- Ilja Ehrenburg
- Albert Einstein
- Friedrich Engels
- Lion Feuchtwanger
- Marieluise Fleißer
- Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster
- Leonhard Frank
- Bruno Frank
- Sigmund Freud
- André Gide
- Ernst Glaser
- Iwan Goll
- Maxim Gorki
- George Grosz
- Jaroslav Hašek
- Werner Hegemann
- Heinrich Heine
- Ernest Hemingway
- Hermann Hesse
- Ödön von Horvath
- Heinrich Eduard Jacob
- James Joyce
- Franz Kafka
- Georg Kaiser
- Erich Kästner
- Helen Keller
- Alfred Kerr
- Egon Erwin Kisch
- Karl Kraus
- Vladimir Lenin
- Theodor Lessing
- Alexander Lernet-Holenia
- Karl Liebknecht
- Jack London
- Georg Lukács
- Rosa Luxemburg
- Heinrich Mann
- Klaus Mann
- Thomas Mann (this is contradicted on his page)
- Ludwig Marcuse
- Karl Marx
- Vladimir Mayakovsky
- Ludwig von Mises
- Robert Musil
- Ernst Erich Noth
- Carl von Ossietzky
- John Dos Passos
- Erwin Piscator
- Alfred Polgar
- Marcel Proust
- Eugen Relgis
- Erich Maria Remarque
- Ludwig Renn
- Joachim Ringelnatz
- Romain Rolland
- Joseph Roth
- Nelly Sachs
- Felix Salten
- Anna Seghers
- Upton Sinclair
- Arthur Schnitzler
- Carl Sternheim
- Bertha von Suttner
- Ernst Toller
- Leon Trotsky
- Kurt Tucholsky
- Jakob Wassermann
- Franz Werfel
- Grete Weiskopf
- H. G. Wells
- Émile Zola
- Arnold Zweig
- Stefan Zweig
Notes
- This article incorporates text from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and has been released under the GFDL.
- ^ Read No Evil Time magazine, May 27, 1946
- ^ Cora Goldstein "PURGES, EXCLUSIONS, AND LIMITS: ART POLICIES IN GERMANY 1933-1949, URL at Wayback machine
External links
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Book Burning
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Library Bibliography: 1933 Book Burnings
- Prescott eNews Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings
Categories:- 1933 in Germany
- Censorship in Germany
- Nazism
- The Holocaust in Germany
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