Notes For May 10th, 2022
This Day In Literary History
On May 10th, 1933, the Nazis staged the largest public book burning in modern history, burning tens of thousands of books at the Bebelplatz in Berlin. It all began just over a month earlier in April.
On April 8th, the German Student Union's Main Office for Press and Propaganda proclaimed a national "Action against the Un-German Spirit" campaign to purge all subversive literature in order to create a pure German culture.
The campaign was directed by Nazi Party officials, most notably Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. A list of around 4,000 titles was compiled, and white nationalist students in university towns were encouraged to go on raids.
Tens of thousands of books were seized from libraries, bookshops, and private collections. On May 6th, Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research was raided and its entire archive of some 20,000 books and journals was confiscated.
By May 10th, the night of the public burning in Berlin, as many as 90,000 books had been seized. The works of Germany's greatest intellectuals and writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays were about be to consigned to the fire.
Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Max Engels, Bertholt Brecht, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, and Stefan Zweig were among the German authors whose works were burned.
First and foremost, it was a campaign aimed at German Jewish writers and intellectuals whom the Nazis believed were poisoning the minds of young Germans, but the blacklist also included writers such as H.G. Wells, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, and Helen Keller.
Other names on the blacklist included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Upton Sinclair, Aldous Huxley, Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxim Gorky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy.
Writers who were not Jewish but expressed ideas considered pro-Jewish, anti-German, liberal, socialist, communist, pacifist, anarchist, anti-nationalist, or pornographic had their works banned and burned by the Nazis.
Some 40,000 people attended the book burning ceremony in Berlin, which included live music, singing, oaths, and incantations. Top Nazi Party officials, Nazi professors, religious leaders, and student leaders addressed the crowd.
The keynote speaker was Joseph Goebbels, who gave a fiery speech before setting the first pile of books alight: "Yes to decency and morality in family and state! No to decadence and moral corruption! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser, Erich Kästner."
He went on to say:
The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path... The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. As a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death - this is the task of this young generation. And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed - a deed which should document the following for the world to know - Here the intellectual foundation of the November Republic is sinking to the ground, but from this wreckage the phoenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise.
News of the massive book burning spread around the world in newspapers and on radio broadcasts, with filmed footage of it appearing in newsreels. People were absolutely shocked by this monstrous act of censorship and thought control.
One of them was an American teenager named Ray Bradbury, who was inspired by the Nazi book burning (and the McCarthy era of anti-communist persecution) to write his classic novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), about a future America where all books are banned and burned.
The Nazis were neither the first people in history to burn books, nor were they the last. Book burning still takes place, even in America, where Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) was burned by high school administrators in 1973, while Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials fantasy novels were set alight by Christian groups in the last twenty years.
And now in America, in 2022, we have elected officials in conservative states like Florida and Texas removing textbooks from public school classrooms for daring to contradict their idiotic right wing political and religious beliefs and teach children the facts.
Quote Of The Day
"Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people." - Heinrich Heine
Vanguard Video
Today's video features a presentation by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Nazi book burning. Enjoy!
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