The Burning of the Books

Abstract

On 10 May 1933, on the Opernplatz in Berlin, just off Unter den Linden, German student associations staged an elaborate book burning ritual, the result of several weeks’ planning. Bolstered by uniformed brown shirts of the SA and marching bands, great ranks of students filed into the square in a torchlight parade. A carefully constructed timber scaffold full of books was set alight, as uniformed representatives stepped forward and proclaimed their so-called Feuersprüche (‘fire incantations’ or ‘fire oaths’), little planned speeches in which they attacked the books they held responsible for the collapse of Germany. The impresario for the night was the propaganda minister — and erstwhile novelist — Joseph Goebbels. In lightly falling rain he spoke of his hope that from the ashes of the pacifist, defeatist and un-German books that had been burned, the phoenix of the new Reich would rise. That night, and over the next week, similar events were held in university cities across Germany, most of which explicitly followed the model of Berlin by including marching parades, torches and speeches. These fires have since become synonymous with the barbarity of the Nazi regime, but such an understanding was by no means automatic, and the international response to the events tended to be perplexed, even bemused. Through studying the tone of many of these reports, this chapter assays the initial reactions to the German bookfires, and returns them to their historical context.

I know that books don’t burn well.

Heinrich Böll