By midnight on that startling evening the flames from the bonfires were
leaping ten yards into the air. Thousands had gathered to watch the
spectacle. 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 ten 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 eye-witness 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.”
But how did the book burning on May 10 come about? It's easy to generalise
that the Nazis banned literature, music and art by people whom they hated.
But these were the first months of the new regime. 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.
That didn't lessen the resolve of Hitler and his henchmen to persecute the
Jews. But it did make them wary of identifying themselves publicly with any
more anti-Semitic demonstrations that might fall flat.
Instead it was university students who played the leading role in getting the
books burnt. That might seem incredible to us today. Students are supposed
to be free-thinking rebels, not rabble-rousers for the far Right. But 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. Far from defending free expression, 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” (ie, staunchly nationalist ones) for German libraries. Now came the
other side of the coin: the chance to name and shame “bad books” as well.
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 inexpicably, 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”. A couple of
weeks after the book burning, this rash view came back to haunt him. This
was a time of vicious infighting in the Nazis' ranks. Hermann belonged to
one faction. A rival group was furious to have fallen behind in the race to
“purify” German culture - so it set about purging the purgers. Hermann's
review of Mein Kampf was dredged up. His career never recovered. For years
he battled to prove his loyalty to the Führer, without much success. When
war came he joined the German Army and was killed in 1945.
Meanwhile, what were the repercussions of May 10 for the Nazi leadership and
the persecuted writers? The former was horribly emboldened. As Goebbels
frankly 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”.
They were right to be astonished. Without any coercion, the German public had
watched with apparent delight as the books of superstar authors went up in
smoke. Anti-Semitism clearly converged with anti-intellectualism that night.
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. But
this was disbelief 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. That wasn't necessarily because they
approved of the regime. Many felt, as Armin Wegner said, that ‘emigrating is
like dying'.”
One way or another, however, an entire generation of German authors was
silenced, many permanently, on May 10, 1933. “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 horribly 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 of the persecutors had changed; but the persecution went on.
Das Buch der verbrannten Bücher is published by Kiepenheuer &
Witsch, Cologne
