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Weekend Australian
May 30, 2009 Saturday
5 - All-round Review Edition
Spark that consumed a nation
by Richard Morrison
SECTION: REVIEW; Pg. 16
A new book reveals the tragic cost of Adolf Hitler's first big
propaganda success, writes Richard Morrison
BY midnight on that startling evening, the flames from the bonfires
were leaping 9m into the air. Thousands had gathered to watch the
spectacle. Joseph Goebbels had already spoken, proclaiming the end of
``the age of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism''. But still the books
burned, thousands of them. And not just on the Opernplatz in Berlin
but in cities across Germany. By the end of the night a nation had
voluntarily consigned to the flames the best works of its finest
living writers.
The date -- May 10, 1933 -- is now as infamous in the annals of Nazi
tyranny as the Night of the Long Knives the following year or
Kristallnacht in 1938. All are seen as symbolic and horrific
milestones on the road to genocide. But who chose the authors whose
books were to be so publicly burned and whose reputations were
instantaneously trashed? Why were some pro-Nazi writers included? And
what became of the authors in the aftermath?
Until now, the answers have been sketchy at best. But a gripping new
book, just out in Germany, tackles these matters with tenacity and
brilliance. ``I realised I had to write it the first time I saw the
list of authors whose books were burned,'' says Volker Weidermann, the
journalist who has written Das Buch der Verbranntem Bucher (The Book
of the Burning Books).
``I've studied German literature of that period and I read books for
my living [Weidermann is literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Sonntagszeitung]. Yet of the 100-odd German names on the list, I
hadn't heard of half of them. I thought: `Who were these authors? And
were they so bad that, even now, they don't deserve to have their
books read?' So I started tracking down the books and reading them.''
That wasn't easy. Weidermann found some titles advertised on the
internet. Some he discovered in antiquarian bookshops. Then, almost as
he had completed his herculean quest, he came across an old man: a
book collector living near Munich who had spent all his life and money
collecting 15,000 first editions of these banned books. ``He's now
over 80 and desperate for a public library to take on his collection,
but so far none has agreed. It would be a tragedy if these books were
lost all over again.''
What Weidermann discovered when he opened all these banned books
astonished him. ``There are at least four or five of these banned
authors whose books, in my opinion, are forgotten masterpieces. People
such as Maria Leitner, who was terrifically courageous; even when
banned she kept returning to Germany to write reports that were
published abroad. She disappeared in 1941. Or Armin Wegner, who wrote
brilliant eyewitness accounts about the slaughter of the Armenians in
Turkey. In 1933 he actually wrote an open letter to Hitler, explaining
why the Jews were important for Germany. It was an amazingly brave
thing to do. It took just a week or two after that before they found
him, imprisoned him and tortured him.''
Weidermann concedes that there are also badly written books among
those consigned to the flames. ``But as Joseph Roth wrote: `I hold all
the writers whose books were burned in high esteem because the fire
has purified them and ennobled them.' And for any book by the banned
131 authors to have survived the Nazi bonfire is a little triumph:
evidence that someone, somewhere, was resisting tyranny.''
But how did the book burning come about? It's easy to generalise that
the Nazis banned literature, music and art by people they hated. But
these were the first months of the new regime. The Nazis were far from
confident, despite the pro-Hitler euphoria, about how quickly they
could impose anti-Semitic policies. Only a month earlier a boycott of
Jewish shops organised by the regime had failed embarrassingly. That
didn't lessen the resolve of Hitler and his henchmen to persecute the
Jews. But it did make them wary of identifying themselves with any
more anti-Semitic demonstrations that might fall flat.
Instead it was university students who played the leading role in
getting the books burned. That may seem incredible to us today.
Students are supposed to be free-thinking rebels, not rabble-rousers
for the far Right. But as Weidermann points out: ``To support the
Nazis in the early 1930s was an act of rebellion. You were rebelling
against all the confusion of the Weimar Republic, against the
humiliating Treaty of Versailles and in favour of a strong, united,
nationalist Germany.''
In April 1933, the Nazi Students' League called for the ``public
burning of subversive Jewish writings by university students in
response to the shameless anti-German smear campaign conducted by
international Jewry''. These bonfires, in university cities throughout
Germany, were to include material seized from university and public
libraries, as well as bookshops and private
collections. Astonishingly, there was virtually no opposition from
booksellers or university professors. Far from defending free
expression, many academics seemed as enthusiastic about the book
burning as their students. Cologne University announced that ``the
Senate and rector have decided to attend the occasion. Dress: dark
suit.''
But who would draw up this first list of banned books? After all, it
wasn't just a matter of including Jewish authors (who comprised only
40per cent of the list). The Nazis were also keen to suppress the
pacifists and communists who had dominated the Berlin avant-garde cafe
scene in the '20s. The task demanded someone who had read a lot, who
knew the literary scene, yet was firmly fascist. In short, it needed a
Nazi librarian. Step forward, Wolfgang Herrmann.
The ambitious, 25-year-old Herrmann was already giving lectures on
``Nazi librarianship'' back in 1929, when he was still handing out
fines for overdue books in Breslau Municipal Library. By 1932 he was
drawing up lists of ``good books'' for German libraries. Now came the
other side of the coin: the chance to name and shame ``bad books'' as
well. Responding to a request by the militant students, he quickly
wrote down the titles of books by 131 undesirable authors.
His choice was extraordinary. Several American authors, including
Ernest Hemingway, were on the list. So, even more inexplicably, were
three or four pro-Nazi German authors. ``Clearly Herrmann used his big
moment to bring down some people in the literary world that he simply
didn't like,'' Weidermann says.
But Herrmann himself was soon brought down. A year or two earlier he
had written the true but incautious observation that Hitler's Mein
Kampf contained ``no intellectually original and theoretically
well-developed ideas''. A couple of weeks after the book burning, this
rashview came back to haunt him. This was atime of vicious infighting
in the Nazis' ranks. Herrmann belonged to one faction. A rival group
was furious to have fallen behind in the race to purify German
culture, so it set about purging thepurgers. Herrmann's review of Mein
Kampf was dredged up. His career never recovered. Foryears he battled
to prove his loyalty to the fuhrer, without much success. When war
came he joined the German Army and was killed in 1945.
Meanwhile, what were the repercussions of May 10 for the Nazi
leadership and the persecuted writers? The former was horribly
emboldened. As Goebbels frankly admitted in his speech at the Berlin
bonfire, the party hierarchy was astonished that ``so swift and
radical a clearance could be carried out in Germany''.
They were right to be astonished. Without any coercion, the German
public had watched with apparent delight as the books of superstar
authors went up in smoke. Anti-Semitism clearly converged with
anti-intellectualism that night. The Nazi leaders gleefully took
note. Within a year, similar purges were being instigated in concert
life, opera houses, theatres and art galleries.
There was utter disbelief, too, among the writers whose books were
burned. But this was disbelief mingled with dismay, fear or plain
bewilderment. ``My books are burning at the stake in front of the
university where I used to address thousands of people!'' wrote Stefan
Zweig to his friend Romain Rolland. ``And not a single German writer
is protesting at this auto-da-fe. Not even in private letters.''
``Some writers were far-sighted enough to sense what would happen in
Germany, right up to the war and the Holocaust,'' Weidermann says.
``Others had no conception of what was going on or its repercussions.
Some authors immediately emigrated, but many didn't. That wasn't
necessarily because they approved of the regime. Many felt, as Armin
Wegner said, that `emigrating is like dying'.''
One way or another, however, an entire generation of German authors
was silenced, many permanently, on May 10, 1933. ``Just 20 per cent of
the 131 writers whose works were burned that night survived the next
12 years of Hitler's regime,'' Weidermann says. ``Many killed
themselves, often in exile. Some, like Maria Leitner, probably starved
to death. With others, we just don't know. Those were years in which
people simply disappeared.''
For those who did survive until 1945, there was one last, bitter pill
to swallow. ``Many of the famous authors returning to Germany after
the war were devastated to find that there was no audience for them,''
Weidermann says. ``The public that had burned their books in 1933
still didn't want them! That was utterly humiliating for someone like
Thomas Mann, who thought that there was a `better Germany' that would
welcome him back.''
By then, of course, a new tyranny was rising in the east, new in
political complexion but horribly similar in its attitude to literary
freedom.
``During my research I found a list in an antiquarian bookshop of the
thousands of books banned by the East German authorities in the '50s
and '60s,'' Weidermann says. ``Many of the authors were the same ones
that had books burned by the Nazis.''
The faces of the persecutors had changed but the persecution went on.
Das Buch der Verbrannten Bucher is published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch,
Cologne.
May 30, 2009 Saturday
5 - All-round Review Edition
Spark that consumed a nation
by Richard Morrison
SECTION: REVIEW; Pg. 16
A new book reveals the tragic cost of Adolf Hitler's first big
propaganda success, writes Richard Morrison
BY midnight on that startling evening, the flames from the bonfires
were leaping 9m into the air. Thousands had gathered to watch the
spectacle. Joseph Goebbels had already spoken, proclaiming the end of
``the age of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism''. But still the books
burned, thousands of them. And not just on the Opernplatz in Berlin
but in cities across Germany. By the end of the night a nation had
voluntarily consigned to the flames the best works of its finest
living writers.
The date -- May 10, 1933 -- is now as infamous in the annals of Nazi
tyranny as the Night of the Long Knives the following year or
Kristallnacht in 1938. All are seen as symbolic and horrific
milestones on the road to genocide. But who chose the authors whose
books were to be so publicly burned and whose reputations were
instantaneously trashed? Why were some pro-Nazi writers included? And
what became of the authors in the aftermath?
Until now, the answers have been sketchy at best. But a gripping new
book, just out in Germany, tackles these matters with tenacity and
brilliance. ``I realised I had to write it the first time I saw the
list of authors whose books were burned,'' says Volker Weidermann, the
journalist who has written Das Buch der Verbranntem Bucher (The Book
of the Burning Books).
``I've studied German literature of that period and I read books for
my living [Weidermann is literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Sonntagszeitung]. Yet of the 100-odd German names on the list, I
hadn't heard of half of them. I thought: `Who were these authors? And
were they so bad that, even now, they don't deserve to have their
books read?' So I started tracking down the books and reading them.''
That wasn't easy. Weidermann found some titles advertised on the
internet. Some he discovered in antiquarian bookshops. Then, almost as
he had completed his herculean quest, he came across an old man: a
book collector living near Munich who had spent all his life and money
collecting 15,000 first editions of these banned books. ``He's now
over 80 and desperate for a public library to take on his collection,
but so far none has agreed. It would be a tragedy if these books were
lost all over again.''
What Weidermann discovered when he opened all these banned books
astonished him. ``There are at least four or five of these banned
authors whose books, in my opinion, are forgotten masterpieces. People
such as Maria Leitner, who was terrifically courageous; even when
banned she kept returning to Germany to write reports that were
published abroad. She disappeared in 1941. Or Armin Wegner, who wrote
brilliant eyewitness accounts about the slaughter of the Armenians in
Turkey. In 1933 he actually wrote an open letter to Hitler, explaining
why the Jews were important for Germany. It was an amazingly brave
thing to do. It took just a week or two after that before they found
him, imprisoned him and tortured him.''
Weidermann concedes that there are also badly written books among
those consigned to the flames. ``But as Joseph Roth wrote: `I hold all
the writers whose books were burned in high esteem because the fire
has purified them and ennobled them.' And for any book by the banned
131 authors to have survived the Nazi bonfire is a little triumph:
evidence that someone, somewhere, was resisting tyranny.''
But how did the book burning come about? It's easy to generalise that
the Nazis banned literature, music and art by people they hated. But
these were the first months of the new regime. The Nazis were far from
confident, despite the pro-Hitler euphoria, about how quickly they
could impose anti-Semitic policies. Only a month earlier a boycott of
Jewish shops organised by the regime had failed embarrassingly. That
didn't lessen the resolve of Hitler and his henchmen to persecute the
Jews. But it did make them wary of identifying themselves with any
more anti-Semitic demonstrations that might fall flat.
Instead it was university students who played the leading role in
getting the books burned. That may seem incredible to us today.
Students are supposed to be free-thinking rebels, not rabble-rousers
for the far Right. But as Weidermann points out: ``To support the
Nazis in the early 1930s was an act of rebellion. You were rebelling
against all the confusion of the Weimar Republic, against the
humiliating Treaty of Versailles and in favour of a strong, united,
nationalist Germany.''
In April 1933, the Nazi Students' League called for the ``public
burning of subversive Jewish writings by university students in
response to the shameless anti-German smear campaign conducted by
international Jewry''. These bonfires, in university cities throughout
Germany, were to include material seized from university and public
libraries, as well as bookshops and private
collections. Astonishingly, there was virtually no opposition from
booksellers or university professors. Far from defending free
expression, many academics seemed as enthusiastic about the book
burning as their students. Cologne University announced that ``the
Senate and rector have decided to attend the occasion. Dress: dark
suit.''
But who would draw up this first list of banned books? After all, it
wasn't just a matter of including Jewish authors (who comprised only
40per cent of the list). The Nazis were also keen to suppress the
pacifists and communists who had dominated the Berlin avant-garde cafe
scene in the '20s. The task demanded someone who had read a lot, who
knew the literary scene, yet was firmly fascist. In short, it needed a
Nazi librarian. Step forward, Wolfgang Herrmann.
The ambitious, 25-year-old Herrmann was already giving lectures on
``Nazi librarianship'' back in 1929, when he was still handing out
fines for overdue books in Breslau Municipal Library. By 1932 he was
drawing up lists of ``good books'' for German libraries. Now came the
other side of the coin: the chance to name and shame ``bad books'' as
well. Responding to a request by the militant students, he quickly
wrote down the titles of books by 131 undesirable authors.
His choice was extraordinary. Several American authors, including
Ernest Hemingway, were on the list. So, even more inexplicably, were
three or four pro-Nazi German authors. ``Clearly Herrmann used his big
moment to bring down some people in the literary world that he simply
didn't like,'' Weidermann says.
But Herrmann himself was soon brought down. A year or two earlier he
had written the true but incautious observation that Hitler's Mein
Kampf contained ``no intellectually original and theoretically
well-developed ideas''. A couple of weeks after the book burning, this
rashview came back to haunt him. This was atime of vicious infighting
in the Nazis' ranks. Herrmann belonged to one faction. A rival group
was furious to have fallen behind in the race to purify German
culture, so it set about purging thepurgers. Herrmann's review of Mein
Kampf was dredged up. His career never recovered. Foryears he battled
to prove his loyalty to the fuhrer, without much success. When war
came he joined the German Army and was killed in 1945.
Meanwhile, what were the repercussions of May 10 for the Nazi
leadership and the persecuted writers? The former was horribly
emboldened. As Goebbels frankly admitted in his speech at the Berlin
bonfire, the party hierarchy was astonished that ``so swift and
radical a clearance could be carried out in Germany''.
They were right to be astonished. Without any coercion, the German
public had watched with apparent delight as the books of superstar
authors went up in smoke. Anti-Semitism clearly converged with
anti-intellectualism that night. The Nazi leaders gleefully took
note. Within a year, similar purges were being instigated in concert
life, opera houses, theatres and art galleries.
There was utter disbelief, too, among the writers whose books were
burned. But this was disbelief mingled with dismay, fear or plain
bewilderment. ``My books are burning at the stake in front of the
university where I used to address thousands of people!'' wrote Stefan
Zweig to his friend Romain Rolland. ``And not a single German writer
is protesting at this auto-da-fe. Not even in private letters.''
``Some writers were far-sighted enough to sense what would happen in
Germany, right up to the war and the Holocaust,'' Weidermann says.
``Others had no conception of what was going on or its repercussions.
Some authors immediately emigrated, but many didn't. That wasn't
necessarily because they approved of the regime. Many felt, as Armin
Wegner said, that `emigrating is like dying'.''
One way or another, however, an entire generation of German authors
was silenced, many permanently, on May 10, 1933. ``Just 20 per cent of
the 131 writers whose works were burned that night survived the next
12 years of Hitler's regime,'' Weidermann says. ``Many killed
themselves, often in exile. Some, like Maria Leitner, probably starved
to death. With others, we just don't know. Those were years in which
people simply disappeared.''
For those who did survive until 1945, there was one last, bitter pill
to swallow. ``Many of the famous authors returning to Germany after
the war were devastated to find that there was no audience for them,''
Weidermann says. ``The public that had burned their books in 1933
still didn't want them! That was utterly humiliating for someone like
Thomas Mann, who thought that there was a `better Germany' that would
welcome him back.''
By then, of course, a new tyranny was rising in the east, new in
political complexion but horribly similar in its attitude to literary
freedom.
``During my research I found a list in an antiquarian bookshop of the
thousands of books banned by the East German authorities in the '50s
and '60s,'' Weidermann says. ``Many of the authors were the same ones
that had books burned by the Nazis.''
The faces of the persecutors had changed but the persecution went on.
Das Buch der Verbrannten Bucher is published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch,
Cologne.