The Book Thieves Read online

  But the primary task of the war committees was to collect “unclean” literature for burning. Students were ordered to begin the cleanup in their own private libraries, later expanding to public libraries and local bookshops, many of whom cooperated willingly. In the spring of 1933 a more general blacklist of books and authors also began to be compiled. Wolfgang Herrmann, a librarian who had involved himself with right-wing extremist student groups as early as the 1920s, had been working for several years on a list of literature “worthy of being burned.” The first draft only listed 12 names, but this was soon expanded to 131 writers, subdivided into various categories. They included Communists, ranging from Trotsky and Lenin to Bertolt Brecht; pacifists like Erich Maria Remarque; Jewish intellectuals like Walter Benjamin; and many other literary and intellectual figures who had gained prominence during the Weimar Republic.

  Quite apart from critics of nationalism, historians were also blacklisted when their perspective on history did not coincide with that of the Nazis, particularly in books on subjects including the First World War, the Soviet Union, and the Weimar Republic. There were also some thinkers whose global view was utterly rejected by the Nazis, such as Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Both were attacked on the basis of advancing “Jewish science.”

  In addition to “cleaning” their own libraries, the students asked public libraries and local bookshops to make a contribution by giving up their own holdings of “dirty literature.” In many instances, university registrars and teachers collaborated with the students to clean out the school libraries.

  But the war committees also applied more violent methods, aided by local police and storm troopers from the SA, to get their hands on books. A few days before the book burnings, in early May, the students attacked lending libraries and Communist book dealers. The former were especially hated by conservative forces and were described by Wolfgang Herrmann as “literary brothels” spreading dirty, Jewish, decadent literature among decent, ordinary people. Libraries had become extremely popular since the First World War. On account of the economic depression and inflation in Germany during the interwar years, fewer and fewer Germans could afford to buy their own books. Traditional libraries could not provide for the great demand for books, which led to more than fifteen thousand small lending libraries being set up. These libraries provided a low-cost book-lending service, and bought large volumes of the best sellers of the time such as the works of Thomas Mann. These “people’s libraries” were easy victims for the students, while the SA troops also raided private libraries. One much-publicized raid was carried out against an apartment building in Berlin owned by Schutzverband deutscher Schriftsteller, an organization working to protect German writers actively opposing censorship and other forms of state intervention in literature. Some five hundred of the association’s members living in the building had their apartments searched and vandalized. Suspicious books were confiscated or destroyed on the scene, and writers caught with “socialist” literature were detained.

  The most notorious raid was carried out a matter of days before the book burnings, when about a hundred students attacked Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexual Studies), situated in Tiergarten in Berlin. The institute, founded by the medical doctors Magnus Hirschfeld and Arthur Kronfeld, conducted groundbreaking research into sexuality and also worked to promote the rights of women, homosexuals, and transsexuals. For three hours the students went berserk in the building, pouring paint over carpets, breaking windows, covering the walls in graffiti, and destroying paintings, porcelain, and other household goods. They took away books, the institute’s archive, and a large collection of photographs along with a bust of the founder Magnus Hirschfeld.5

  Already in 1932, many Jews and Communists, who could see where the political winds were blowing, had begun to clear out their private libraries and destroy photographs, address books, letters, and diaries. The Communists had sent out warnings to their members that if they were carrying “dangerous” documents they had to be prepared to swallow them. In this way there were also thousands of lesser book pyres, where people set fire to their own libraries in stoves, fireplaces, and backyards. They would soon find out that it was easier said than done: burning books is a time-consuming activity. Instead, many people chose to dump their libraries in forests, rivers, or abandoned streets—others posted them anonymously to nonexistent addresses.6

  After 1933, a large number of German authors chose exile, of their own accord or under duress. Apart from Thomas Mann, they included his brother Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Anna Seghers, Erich Maria Remarque, and hundreds of others. By 1939 some two thousand writers and poets had felt compelled to leave Nazi Germany and Austria. Many of them would never return. But a large number also chose to stay. Some writers who were not expressly political went into what has later been referred to as “interior exile.” They stayed in their German sphere, or “Heimat,” but made the decision not to publish. Alternatively, they released books that were accepted by the board of censors: children’s books, poetry, and historical novels. Others were prevented from publishing their works, because membership in the National Chamber of Literature, a division of Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Public Education and Propaganda, was required before one could be published.

  But there was also another group of writers that joined ranks with the regime. In October 1933 a series of German newspapers published a proclamation signed by eighty-eight German writers and poets under the headline Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, a sort of oath of allegiance. The proclamation was in direct support of Germany’s recent decision to leave the League of Nations. Among the signatories were authors such as Walter Bloem, Hanns Johst, and Agnes Miegel, now mainly forgotten, as their rise and fall is so intimately associated with the regime to which they swore their loyalty.

  At the time, great rewards lay in store for authors who embraced National Socialism. Positions previously closed to them in Germany’s most respected literary academies, foundations, and associations began to open. They also laid claim to new groups of readers, once the regime assumed control of the nation’s foremost book clubs. In 1933 the Nazi-run book club Buchergilde Gutenberg had 25,000 members, whereas a few years later its membership had increased to 330,000. By relying on book clubs like this, the regime was able to efficiently distribute everything from Goethe and Schiller to nationalist, conservative, and Nazi writers to millions of readers.

  The propaganda ministry instigated a literary and political drive that has never been equaled in German history—and probably not in modern history either. The ministry awarded more than fifty literary prizes annually.

  Over the course of the 1930s, Goebbels’s propaganda ministry took complete control of the German book industry, including some 2,500 publishers and 16,000 book dealers and secondhand bookshops.7 One of the first measures was to weed out “Jewish influence” in the world of books by gradually excluding Jews from academies, literary associations, writers’ professional bodies, publishers, book dealers, and printers. Jewish publishers, printers, and book dealers were “Aryanized”—transferred to Aryan owners. Some of these Jewish publishing houses were among the largest in the industry. For instance, Julius Springer was the world’s largest publisher in the field of scientific publishing. It was a step-by-step process that continued throughout the 1930s. Initially the takeovers of Jewish companies and the exclusion of Jews were cautiously handled, to avoid companies losing value or the disruption of international relations. Jewish owners were simply persuaded to sell, and if they refused, the regime resorted to varying degrees of coercion, harassment, and threats. The Aryanization of publishers raised enormous sums of money for the party, the state, and individual businessmen, and after 1936, the practice was legally formalized in the Nuremberg Laws.

  Although the Nazi Party had forced many of the country’s most lauded writers into exile by as early as 1933, it would take considerably longer to get rid of t
heir books. The process was gradual—for example, new editions of Thomas Mann’s works continued going into print until his citizenship was revoked in 1936. Getting German publishers to kick out their authors and preventing new print runs was one thing, but controlling the secondhand market was quite a different matter—not to speak of what was already on the shelves in German homes. In practice, it was an impossible task to get rid of these books entirely, and most blacklisted writers continued to be available throughout the war—even if it was under the counter. The most effective tool available to the regime was self-censorship, meaning that people cleaned up their own collections.

  Another method was to offer the German people new literature. During the 1930s, some twenty thousand new titles were published every year. Books viewed by the propaganda ministry as “educationally beneficial to the people” were pumped out in large, sponsored editions. Books that had only reached limited numbers of readers until then were suddenly in mass circulation. In 1933 alone, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf had a print run of 850,000 copies.8 When it was first published in 1925, it had sold 9,000 copies. Hitler’s biggest customer was the German state, which bought over six million books. The Nazi Party’s own publisher, Franz Eher, which in addition to Mein Kampf also produced Alfred Rosenberg’s Der Mythus des 20 Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century), would eventually grow into one of the party’s most successful companies.

  Classic German literature was given a prominent role in the Third Reich, featuring writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. One genre that lay a good deal closer to Nazi ideology was prose and poetry emphasizing and praising the Aryan race. This would occasionally be presented in an understated way, but frequently by means of vile caricatures of Jews, Slavs, Roma, black people, and Asians. These stories often accentuated the direct connections between race and personal traits, in other words that Jews were “unreliable,” “greedy,” and “devious” by nature. The greatest success was Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum (People Without Room). In this novel, Grimm proposed that the Germans lost the First World War because they had “too little space to live in.” Germany would never be able to achieve its full potential without more land in Europe and the colonies. The book sold almost half a million copies in Nazi Germany, and the title was used by the regime as a slogan.

  • • •

  At 11 p.m. on May 10, 1933, Berlin students marched toward Opernplatz in a torch-lit procession, holding aloft a bust of the founder of the Institute for Sexual Studies, Magnus Hirschfeld, like the severed head of a deposed king. Later the bust was thrown into the fire with books from the institute. On the same night, book fires were lit in ninety different places in Germany. Deutsche Studentenschaft had made detailed plans for how the fires should be organized and coordinated. They were held in central, public locations, and in many cities powerful spotlights had been acquired to heighten the effect. The pyres had often been built up days in advance and decorated with photographs of Lenin and flags of the Weimar Republic.

  In some places the blacklisted books were brought into the squares on manure carts drawn by oxen—as if on their way to execution. In other places, books were nailed to pillories. Students wearing ceremonial faculty uniforms and the badges of their regional student federations marched with uniformed vanguards of Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), SA, SS, and Stahlheim, the latter a free paramilitary group. Military music was played and songs sung, such as the Nazi battle song “Kampflied der Nationalsozialisten.” While books were ritually thrown into the fires, nine prepared “fire oaths” were sworn, in which the names of some of the condemned writers and the charges against them were specified.

  Students, teachers, principals, and local Nazi leaders gave speeches to the assemblies, and this attracted large crowds. In Berlin it is believed that as many as forty thousand people were gathered in Opernplatz, and in other cities there were reports of crowds of up to fifteen thousand people.9 Even greater numbers were reached via the radio, which broadcast live from the events in Berlin—where Joseph Goebbels made an address to the crowd. A camera team was there to capture it all, the film later shown in cinemas around Germany.

  Goebbels, who had recently set up his propaganda ministry, had secretly encouraged the students’ initiative, although it would be a while yet before Wolfgang Herrmann’s blacklist became a part of official cultural policy. There were also varying ideas within the Nazi movement about the sort of literary policy that ought to be pursued. Certain wings in the party were concerned about strong international condemnation of the book burnings. There was also a justified fear in the new regime that it could lose control of the extensive right-wing revolutionary fervor sweeping across Germany in the spring of 1933. Even Goebbels waited until the last possible moment before publicly giving his support to the arrangements.

  The book burnings were above all ritual dramas rather than in any real sense a full “cleansing” of Germany’s libraries and bookshelves. Goebbels was well aware of the symbolic importance of the book pyres, from both a historical and a political perspective, as fevered baptismal ceremonies for a reborn Germany. Purification through fire was an ancient ritual that appealed to the new regime. Goebbels emphasized this in his speech to the crowds in Berlin, proclaiming that “here, the intellectual foundations of the November Republic sink to the ground, but from the debris a new spirit will rise triumphantly like the Phoenix.”10

  Books continued to be burned all around Germany well into the summer. In certain cities, such as Hamburg and Heidelberg, there were several book burnings. But contemporary opinion diverged on the importance of the burning of books. Many German intellectuals, such as Heinrich Böll and Hans Mayer, toned down the events—which they viewed as nothing more than student antics, even if very unpleasant ones. They believed that the book burnings were expressions of revolutionary spring fever, and in time the new regime would “grow out of” such things.

  Sigmund Freud’s laconic comment on the book burnings was “Just our books? In the olden days they would have burned us with them.” Others were considerably more shocked about the sheer speed at which the political realities had shifted. The writer Stefan Zweig later described in his memoirs how it had “seemed quite beyond the limits of what was conceivable, even to people of foresight.”11

  Even on an international level there were different opinions about the importance of the book burnings. Some quarters dismissed them as “ludicrous,” “meaningless,” and “infantile.” Others, including Helen Keller, Newsweek magazine, and the writer Ludwig Lewisohn, saw them as a barbaric attack on ideas themselves.12,13 The most emphatic reaction of all came from the American Jewish Congress, based in New York, which regarded the book burnings as an expression of the regime’s anti-Semitism and persecution of German Jews. Demonstrations were held in several cities in the United States, and in New York some 100,000 people marched on May 10, 1933—one of the largest demonstrations ever seen in the city.

  The visual power of the book burnings and their media penetration were already pronounced in their own time, yet because of the symbolic connection with the Holocaust, they would acquire even more potency in the postwar period. Although it was neither the first nor the last time in history that books have been burned, the book burnings in Germany would eventually become the most striking metaphor of all for censorship and oppression—and a continued moral warning whenever books are burned. In the United States, a parallel was later drawn in the 1950s as a protest against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade, when “subversive” books were removed from many American libraries.

  The book burnings established the reputation of the Nazi regime as “cultural barbarians.” The burnings became an image of the intellectual destruction that would follow in the 1930s and 1940s, when Nazism took control of an entire people’s linguistic, cultural, and creative outlets. But they were also an indication of how the Nazis’ genocides against their enemies were not only physical but a
lso cultural.

  Yet at the same time, the smoke of the book pyres and their cultural repercussions have hidden something else. The way in which posterity interpreted the book burnings has not been so very distinct from that of the Nazis themselves, who regarded them as ritual games and propaganda spectacles. The image of burning books has been altogether too tempting, too effective, and too symbolic not to be used and applied in the writing of history. But the burning of books became so powerful a metaphor for cultural annihilation that it overshadowed another more unpleasant narrative, namely how the Nazis did a great deal more than simply destroy books—they were also driven by a fanatical obsession to collect them.

  While the embers of Germany’s book fires slowly cooled, a plan was beginning to form in the intellectual and ideological circles of the Nazi Party. This plan was not intent on intellectual, cultural, and literary annihilation, but in fact had other, far more alarming intentions. All in all, only a few tens of thousands of books were burned in May 1933. But the raids organized by the party confiscated and plundered far more books, often in secret. After the students had vandalized the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, the SA impounded most of the institute’s library—in excess of ten thousand books. However, they were not taken to Opernplatz but rather to the SA headquarters.

  The Nazis were not going to destroy their enemies by eradicating the literary and cultural inheritance of Communists, Social Democrats, liberals, homosexuals, Jews, Roma, and Slavs. Nazis were not, properly speaking, the sort of “cultural barbarians” they were purported to be, nor were they anti-intellectual. They intended instead to create a new sort of intellectual being, one who did not base himself on values such as liberalism and humanism but rather on his nation and race.