Nazi book burnings

From 1929–1931 the German Student Union had been taken over by nationalist, antisemitic forces, and in early April 1933 it proclaimed a four-week “Action against the Un-German Spirit”, to begin on 12 April and end with public book burnings on 10 May. Each university formed a “fighting committee” of two students, a professor, a representative of Rosenberg’s Militant League for German Culture and a writer, and on 12 April the “Twelve Theses against the Un-German Spirit”, denouncing Jewish, Social Democratic, communist and liberal ideas, were posted in red Fraktur. In Rostock students nailed books by Hirschfeld, Tucholsky, Stefan Zweig, Remarque and others to a “pillory” on 5 May. The final phase began on 6 May with the looting of lending libraries and bookshops; in Berlin students of the College of Physical Education and the Veterinary College stormed Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in the Tiergarten and plundered its library of more than ten thousand volumes.

Hirschfeld watched the destruction of his life’s work in a newsreel in a Paris cinema. On 9 May the Student Union circulated the “fire incantations” to be shouted at the burnings. On the night of 10 May a torchlight procession in Berlin followed lorries loaded with some 25,000 books to the Opernplatz, carrying the head of a smashed bust of Hirschfeld on a pole; when pouring rain kept the pyre from catching, the fire brigade helped with petrol. Nine chosen students threw the first books to the incantations, and the works of 94 authors, among them Marx, Heine, Tucholsky and Freud, the last condemned as “soul-destroying”, followed into the flames.

Some 70,000 people attended, Propaganda Minister Goebbels spoke towards midnight, and Erich Kästner heard his own name called from the crowd. Burnings took place the same day in 18 other university towns, and from March the SA and SS, later the Hitler Youth and others, burned books in many places. The lists included German-language writers such as Brecht, Einstein, Kafka, Heinrich Mann, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Lukács, and Soviet authors such as Gorky, Kollontai, Lenin and Trotsky. With the burnings as their climax, writers were banned from publishing, stripped of citizenship, driven into exile or killed in camps.

Protests at home, such as the Berlin rector’s threat to resign, were rare; abroad there were a mass march in New York, Helen Keller’s protest and the founding of a German PEN in exile. A glass panel in Berlin’s Bebelplatz now looks down on a memorial of empty bookshelves.