It was raining on the night of the fire in May 1933. A last-minute downpour threatened to ruin the event. It was too late to postpone plans that had been underway for weeks. A specialist pyrotechnic company had been hired to oversee the spectacle. On the opera house square, they had set up a dovetailed structure of wooden logs doused with fuel. Underneath, a layer of sand to protect the surface from scorch marks.
At the State Library, next to the site of the proposed fire, students were heard entering with their slogans echoing around corridors, carrying with them a list of unwanted books. The list had been drawn up by a disgruntled former librarian who found you could hate books as much as you could love them. My author was on the list. He had already fled to France by then.
A sense of fear ran through the shelves as the titles were called out. Books saying quick goodbyes to each other as they were being tied up in bundles with twine, ready to be carried outside. The students worked diligently, using their considerable learning skills to search the catalogue for titles to be torn from the canon like bad teeth, passing them along in a human chain to the site of the fire outside on the square.
Incompatible with the national interest.
The students had an air of triumph. This was their moment. Their revenge on learning. All those years spent sitting at desks, forced to love books they detested. Their hearts and minds were no longer dedicated to books but to new infrastructure, the autobahn. This was their chance to step outside received wisdom and take part in a glorious act of self-vandalism. Returning to a time before knowledge. The right not to know.
Unlearning everything but the spirit of the nation.
As it happened, I was not in the library myself that evening. My author’s books were part of the catalogue at the State Library, but I belonged to a professor of German literature by the name of David Glückstein. He had brought me with him in his briefcase to the Humboldt University on the other side of the square because he was unsure how far this cleansing action would go, whether the students would also be going into people’s homes, which they later did. In his office, the professor had arranged a meeting with one of his trusted students, where I was quietly handed over for safekeeping.
The student’s name was Dieter Knecht – Lena’s grandfather. A tall young man with a soft voice, given to reading more than to athletic pursuits. He was about to finish his undergraduate degree in German literature. He took me in his hands and they spoke about my author for a little while with some fondness.
By accepting this contraband novel, by rescuing this single volume from the fire that evening, Lena’s grandfather set in motion a quiet wave of resistance that has continued to this day. It was a small but significant event taking place behind closed doors, away from the catastrophe outside. It changed the course of people’s lives. It had an impact on decisions made later under entirely different circumstances, long after the book-burners disappeared.
Hearing the chants and slogans in the corridor, Lena’s grandfather swiftly tucked me inside his coat, next to his heart. He held me in place with a stiff arm across his chest and made his way out, down a wide set of stone stairs.
Outside on the opera house square, the fire was going strong. Students had already raided the offices of the Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Science. They railed against filth in literature, against sexual freedom, capitalism, Jewish dominance, as they called it. The human chain leading from the library to the site of the fire continued delivering the hated books. Each author was denounced in a summary trial, the name called out, giving a reason why they no longer fitted into the national vision, before their books were committed to the fire. All this was being broadcast by radio around the nation.
My author belonged to what was called asphalt literature, the new writing of multicultural cities.
The first books to be thrown into the flames were written by Karl Marx. Followed by many more Jewish authors. An author who was mistaken for being Jewish by the sound of his name and later protested vigorously at being maligned in this way. A woman whose female characters showed too much self-assertion and didn’t fit in with the Nazi ideals of motherhood. The Magic Mountain was spared from the fire but his brother The Blue Angel was not. A playwright who wrote about a man who has his genitals blown away in battle. And the more famous playwright, whose Threepenny Opera had won huge acclaim in Berlin and who later wrote a poem to express how glad he was not to be left out – burn me, please don’t leave me unburned.
Among the spectators gathered around the fire, a woman’s voice was heard saying – beautiful time, beautiful time. What did she mean? Rejoicing at this new anti-intellectual age in which you could stop thinking, when you no longer had to find out anything you didn’t already agree with?
More and more books were being added to the flames. A man in a white shirt recoiled from the slap of heat when he got too close. Fire brigade attendants stood by. An author whose books were being burned in front of his own eyes had to leave suddenly when his name was called out.
Many of the books burned alive that night had something to do with war. Books that refused to glorify death. Non-heroic accounts of men with missing limbs and severed spines and lung trouble. Men with half-faces. Berlin was full of shivering men sitting in rooms with their families unable to make sense of them. All those descriptions of casualties were to be taken out of the public domain because they were deemed bad for morale and they put people off war, encouraging a poor attitude towards death and suffering.
As a journalist, my author reported on his visit to a hospital where two thousand five hundred men lay recovering, all born healthy and remodelled on the battlefield. A soldier went out to the front and came back a fragment of a man. Living war memorials, he called them. One of the men he met in that hospital was missing his lips. A grenade had struck him in such a way that he was otherwise completely unhurt, only his lips were gone – unable to kiss.
The main character in Rebellion is based on these damaged men. A war veteran by the name of Andreas Pum who finds himself in a military hospital full of broken bodies. He has lost a leg in action and received a medal. Like the other invalided soldiers, he envies the shivering man because he will be looked after by the state. When Andreas finally goes before a commission in charge of handing out livelihoods, he drops his crutch in a panic and falls into a fit of shivering. A moment of luck. His shivering is the making of him. It draws the empathy of the officials watching him fall and he is instantly rewarded with a licence to play the barrel organ. A secure future as an artist opens up for him, playing a rotating selection of eight tunes around city streets. He takes up lodgings in a house with a sausage thief named Willi and his lover, Klara. She works as a cashier and earns money on the side. Andreas watches her undressing. He hears them kissing and falls asleep dreaming of love.
The story of this decorated veteran, with no intention of harming state laws or doing any more than earn a living, was now classified as unworthy of life in literature.
Lena’s grandfather stood watching the fire with me tucked inside his coat. The faces of the onlookers were lit up in the warm glow of the flames. Their eyes turned jet black. Their lips were green. Their nostrils inhaled the pungent paper-smoke that came from those books, like the smell of burning hair.
It was a bonfire of life stories. The pages were curling and flying in black scraps over the rooftops. These imagined lives, these human thought-roads, were being turned into worthless heat. The words were no longer bound together in sentences. They had been discharged of all meaning. From inside the flames came the sound of voices rising in a collective stream of consciousness, extracted like free prose from the text, a ghostly recital of absurd phrases and detached bits of dialogue. Expressions of love. Men calling their mothers. Crying children being removed from their parents. Homes turned to ash and family histories dissolving into vapours in one long, silent scream of pity that could be heard right around the city.
Just before midnight, Joseph Goebbels came to make a speech. Microphones had been set up for him away from the fire. Some bottles of water on a small table in case he got thirsty. Wearing a beige coat and speaking in a voice that overestimated his stature, he praised the students for their cleansing action. He said it was the end of Jewish supremacy in literature. No more asphalt writing. Time to regain proper admiration for death.
He spoke about the will of the people.