1933 Just six weeks after the Nazis achieved a majority in the parliament and Hitler assumed the chancellorship, loyal student associations combined to organise the first public book-burnings of what would become the Third Reich, in the Opernplatz in Berlin’s Unter den Linden Strasse. The aim of the exercise was symbolic rather than in any way methodically censorious.
The SA (Ernst Röhm’s brown-shirted stormtroopers) supplied a guard of honour; brass bands played. It was night, and the students entered as a torchlit parade. The event was choreographed and photographed by the newly formed Ministry of Propaganda. A large scaffold was erected for the incineration itself, which was ritually performed. Representative students would advance towards the flame to intone their Feuersprüche – fire oath – before casting the anathematised ‘un-German’ volume into the flames. The whole event was presided over by Josef Goebbels (himself a novelist).
After the burning of the Reichstag (27 February 1933), the May book-burning was imitated in university cities over the whole of Germany. It demonstrated, forcibly, the control over the mind of the country that the new government (still for the moment nominally democratic – the Nazis had been voted into power) would enforce. Works regarded as Marxist or decadent (‘Asphaltliteratur’) or by Jewish writers were methodically targeted. Heine was everywhere burned. Even statues to him were pulled down.
The images of what the book historian Matthew Fishburn calls the ‘Bibliocaust’ were publicised in newspapers and newscasts across the world. In Britain, protest solidified as the ‘Library of the Burned Books’, an association under the international presidency of H.G. Wells, Romain Rolland, Heinrich Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger (all notable ‘burnees’). An exhibition of the ‘Burned Books’ was put on display in Paris in May 1934. As their literature proclaimed:
Among the books which were burned or suppressed in Germany were such classics as the entire works of Heinrich Heine, and various writings by Lessing, Voltaire, Einstein and Freud. Further the novels of such modern authors as Heinrich Mann, E.M. Remarque, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Jacob Wassermann and the historical works of Emil Ludwig and Mehring were also destroyed.
In the longer term the Nazi Bibliocaust had the perverse (for the book-burners) effect of liberalising the British and American book world – as a demonstration of democratic liberty. Judge Woolsey’s ruling in the US in 1934 that Joyce’s Ulysses was not obscene and the uninhibited publication of the work by The Bodley Head in the UK in 1936 can plausibly be seen as responses to Nazi censorship.
More dramatic was the ostentatious display and wide circulation of James Murphy’s translation of Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in the mid-to late 1930s. Hitler’s book received a sales boost in the UK after the outbreak of war and was at one point, in 1941, listed as a bestseller. Its production was halted not by any action of the authorities but by a Luftwaffe raid on the publisher, Hutchinson, in early 1942, which destroyed the stereo plates. It is not recorded whether the bombs in question were high explosive or incendiary.