For whatever reason he also included Ernst Glaeser, who ultimately made his peace with the Nazis and returned to the Third Reich.' Whatever their merit or standard, these commemorative articles and events impel retrospective self-examination on our part as Americans. Similarly, an article written by a high-ranking East German official, Klaus Hopcke, deputy cultural minister of the GDR, does not mention that books by Jewish authors were specifically burnt (though he does include some of them by name). Regrettably, each reproduction had on the back a description, in English, that failed to mention that the books of Jewish authors-qua Jewish authors-were also burnt on the pyres it read: "organised destruction of works by authors of MarxismLeninism, the leaders of the working class movement, and works of German national and world literature." The German Democratic Republic, beyond holding ceremonies, mailed out thousands of packets from its central photo agency with pictures of the Berlin and Leipzig book burnings. On, for example, a commemorative ceremony was held in the Konzerthaus of Vienna with a major and significant address delivered by Rolf Hochhuth, author of The Deputy. These acts of contrition were replicated in Austria and the German Democratic Republic. Other cities in Germany followed suit the media accorded wide publicity to the commemoration.
The exhibit featured a representative sampling of the burnt books, displayed photographs of the writers-who ranged from Albert Einstein to Thomas Mann, Jack London to Ernest Hemingway-and acquainted large crowds of viewers, many for the first time, with the reaction abroad to the book burning. In an effort to ensure that this sequence or consequence will be remembered by the new generation of Germans, the Academy of Arts of West Berlin, under a grant from the Berlin Senate, opened a huge exhibit, two years in the making, which was shown in Berlin and other major cities in the Federal Republic of Germany. Even then, some knowledgeable journalists recalled the prediction of the poet Heinrich Heine, who had said a century earlier: "Where one burns books, one will soon burn people."įifty years have elapsed since books were burned in German university towns and almost forty years since the corpses of those murdered were burned in the crematoria. German newspapers reported in triumph that Germany was beginning to purge itself of the alien and decadent corrupters of the German spirit, while newspapers and magazines abroad, from as far away as China and Japan, responded in surprise and shock. The next day, and in the weeks following, there was a massive reaction in the world press, especially since many other German university towns imitated this infamous act. The egregiously primitive act lasted for hours, interrupted only by the incantation of Nazi songs and a speech by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Accompanying their actions with declaimed denunciations of the authors, they proceeded to toss thousands of titles, by writers famous and obscure, foreign and native, into the flames of an already ignited bonfire. Students from the Wilhelm Humboldt University, all of them members of right-wing student organizations, transported books from their university library and from other collections to the Franz Joseph Platz adjacent to the university. On, a remarkable act of barbarism, a prelude to the many worse ones that followed, took place in the city of Berlin. The Burning of the Books in Nazi Germany, 1933: The American Response
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