How the Nazis Burned Books First, People Then

On a rainy May night, German writer Erich Kästner stands among Nazi SA officers and onlookers in front of a burning pyre that lights up Berlin’s Opernplatz, now called Bebelplatz. Men in uniform throw piles of books into the fire. Kästner listens as his name is shouted into a microphone: “Against decadence and moral decay! For discipline and decency in family and state! I commit to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser and Erich Kästner!”

A barbaric act that reverberates to this day

It is the night of May 10, 1933. In Berlin and 21 other cities across Germany, bonfires are stoked with books. It is an act of barbarism that continues to reverberate to this day.

“Had there not been Nazism; had there not been book burnings, surely the cultural diversity and innovative spirit that developed in Germany in the 1920s would have continued,” says historian Werner Tress, author of several important books on Nazism. subject.

But the rise of the Nazis to power put a decisive end to the cultural flowering that Germany experienced during the Weimar Republic (1919 to 1933). And the May 10 book burning was an undeniable indication of that.

The cultural elite of the Weimar Republic flees

Many of the writers and intellectuals whose books were burned had left Germany by this time. Alfred Kerr, Bertolt Brecht, the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, the brothers Erika and Klaus Mann, Albert Einstein, Else Lasker-Schüler, Irmgard Keun, Ernst Toller – to name just a few – were among the cultural elite of the Weimar Republic who fled of the Nazis. When the Nazis took power and Adolf Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933, it was clear to them that they had no future in Germany.

Enemies of the Nazis: Jews, Leftists, Liberals

In the years leading up to their seizure of power, the Nazis had already demonstrated their readiness to fight their opponents – which included all Jews, but also any artists who disagreed with them politically. Anyone who did not toe the ideological line of the Nazis was vilified as “non-German”, their names and jobs added to continually updated blacklists.

In May 1933, over 200 writers were blacklisted; a year later, more than 3,500 written works had been banned.

Convict: ‘All quiet on the Western Front’

The Nazis especially despised the novelist Erich Maria Remarque. His 1928 novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” is a pitiless depiction of the horrors of World War I, and was first adapted for film by Hollywood in 1930.

Nazis and German conservatives had already attacked the book and its pacifist message, accusing it of discrediting German soldiers, and when the film version was released in Germany in 1930, SA thugs stopped showings and obtained a temporary ban on the film.

In May 1933, Remarque also no longer lived in Germany. He had emigrated to Switzerland shortly before the Nazis took power in January of that year.

An open letter from an icon of the USA

While Erich Kästner was possibly the only author to witness the burning of his own books on the night of May 10, 1933, the New York Times published an open letter addressed to German university students. The German Students’ Association had been dominated by the Nazis since 1931 and had been instrumental in organizing the book burnings.

“History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas,” the letter read. “Tyrants have tried to do this many times before, and the ideas have come in force and destroyed them.” Those words were penned by Helen Keller, the blind and deaf American writer and activist, whose book, “How I Became a Socialist,” was among those that ended up being thrown into the flames, along with works by other international writers such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, Maxim Gorky, Alexandra Kollontai, Jaroslav Hasek and Sholem Asch, to name just a few.

Kastner recognized among the crowd

Just before midnight on May 10, 1933, a young woman at the Berlin book burning on Opernplatz shouted, “That’s Kästner over there!”

Erich Kästner was “uneasy”, as he later wrote. He left the square but remained in Germany, somehow keeping his head afloat in the years to come. As a non-Jew, he managed to survive until the end of the Nazi dictatorship in 1945.

persecution and death

Others weren’t so lucky.

Journalist and novelist Carl von Ossietzky was arrested in 1933 and died in 1938 after years of imprisonment and torture in hospital custody.

The anti-militarist journalist Erich Mühsam was murdered in 1934 in the Oranienburg concentration camp.

And the German-Jewish poet Gertrud Kolmar, who stayed in Berlin to care for her father, died in 1943 in the Auschwitz death camp.

Those who managed to exile themselves abroad had to start a new life, often in a new language. For many, this meant the end of their writing careers, as in the cases of Irmgard Keun, author of the 1932 novel “The Artificial Silk Girl”, and Alfred Döblin, who wrote “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1929).

Others were driven to suicide by psychological or financial difficulties, or by the horrors of flight – like Walter Benjamin, Stefan Zweig and Ernst Toller.

success in exile

Only a few emigrants from the European cultural scene managed to continue their careers, such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann.

“The influx of immigrants from Germany was a great boon to American universities and cultural institutions,” says historian Tress, “from which they still benefit today. But I would argue that we in Germany have not yet recovered from the loss. what it meant to us.”

Where books are burned, eventually people will be burned too.

What is now Bebelplatz in Berlin features a book burning memorial, a 1995 work by Israeli sculptor Micha Ullmann titled “The Empty Library” – an underground room lined with empty white bookshelves, visible through glass set into the pavement. A nearby sign reads: “Where books are burned, people will also be burned.”

Those words, written by the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine in 1820, became a terrible reality in Nazi Germany.

“In 1933 the Nazis burned books, and in 1938 they burned synagogues,” says Tress. “And in 1942 and 1943, in the Shoah, the organized genocide of European Jews, people were burned.”

It’s not a Nazi invention

Heinrich Heine was not clairvoyant; his words referred to the burning of books in medieval Spain.

The Nazis were by no means the inventors of this barbaric act, which has a long tradition. Books (and people) have been burned throughout the centuries of Christian and Islamic history, as well as in ancient Greece and China and, in more recent times, in Iran and Russia.

Authoritarian regimes around the world fear the power of the free word to question their rule – and in the case of the Nazis, so much so that among the works that burned on May 10, 1933 were those of Heinrich Heine, more than 70 years after the poet died in exile in Paris.

This article was originally written in German.