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May 6, 2008

Bruce's History Lessons: This week in 1933: The Nazi book burnings

By Bruce Kaufmann

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning humans.”

— German Poet Heinrich Heine, 1820

Any course syllabus that had as your reading requirement books by John Dos Passos, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Emile Zola, H.G. Wells, Andre Gide, Sigmund Freud, Maxim Gorky, Friedrich Foster, Marcel Proust, Jack London and Erich Maria Remarque would be both illuminating and enlightening. Unless you lived in Germany in 1933.

If you did live in Germany at that time you would, of course, be living in a country ruled by Nazi Party leader and German Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who took a dim view of art that was either created by Jews or was “un-German in spirit.”

And, not surprisingly, this dim view of Jewish or “un-German” art was shared by one of his chief acolytes, Nazi Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (only in Nazi Germany would an official even have a title like that, let alone be proud of it). Goebbels thought Germany’s art should be more in line with Germany’s political and social goals, which at that time consisted of glorifying Nazism, Aryan superiority, German nationalism and Herr Hitler himself.

Any artistic work — especially literature — that was not devoted to those topics, or was created by Jews, was considered heresy and in need of censorship.

And censored it was, beginning with the Goebbels-directed German Student Association, which developed an “Action Against the Un-German Spirit” campaign that sent student members of the Nazi Party marching into towns across Germany for the express purpose of tossing books banned by the Nazi Party into bonfires and destroying them. This nationwide bonfire party culminated this week (May 10) in 1933 with the burning of some 25,000 books, including books by the authors listed above. On the night in question, local Nazi Party officials and university professors sympathetic to the Nazi Party addressed large crowds, inciting them to burn their Jewish and “un-German” books as a way of re-affirming traditional values and “purifying the German language and literature” against the “smear campaign” being conducted by Jews and other anti-German intellectuals.

It was the next step in Hitler’s drive to control all German thought, expression and cultural and political belief, and in the ensuing years it wasn’t just books that were banned or censored, but also all Jewish or “un-German” music, paintings, photographs, plays and films. In addition, all Jewish or “un-German” newspapers and magazines were banned or censored, and then religious groups, cultural institutions and political parties.

And finally, as Heinrich Heine predicted a century earlier, Jews and other “un-German” people (gypsies, Slavs, the mentally and physically handicapped) were themselves banned, censored, and — in the crematoriums at Auschwitz, Dachau and elsewhere — burned.

Bruce Kauffmann’s e-mail address is bruce@historylessons.net

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