Books Are Weapons: Wartime Responses to the Nazi Bookfires of 1933

though the burning of books remains the most perverse gesture

—H.D., The Walls do not Fall (1944)

On May 10, 1933, in Berlin on the Opernplatz, just off Unter den Linden, the national student associations staged an elaborate book burning ritual. There were marching bands and great ranks of students in a torchlight parade. Once the bonfire was primed with gasoline, uniformed representatives stood forward and proclaimed their so-called "fire-incantations"—little planned speeches in which they attacked the books they held responsible for the collapse of Germany. Similar events were held in university cities across Germany that night and over the following week, most following the model set in Berlin. For the nascent Third Reich, which adopted the purifying fire as its fundamental symbol, it is scarcely surprising that it took less than four months before books were burnt across the country.

Prior to the efforts of the Nazis, the most famous bonfire in Germany had been Martin Luther's burning of the papal bull Exsurge Domine in 1520, a theatrical break with the past that the Nazi students consciously imitated. In Berlin, the impresario for the night was the propaganda minister—and erstwhile novelist—Joseph Goebbels. In lightly falling rain he spoke of his hope that from the ashes of the pacifist, defeatist, and un-German books that had been burnt, the phoenix of the new Reich would rise. The fires were an international sensation, but not easily understood—for every somber account there were many others who mocked it as anachronistic, or who watched in baffled incomprehension. The German bonfires may have returned the idea of book burning to prominence, but rather than being a self-evident statement, their immediate effect was a chaotic profusion of reactions.

Over seven years later, in July 1940, Life magazine published a series of paintings and drawings made by American and British children who had been encouraged to portray their response to the war news.¹ The paintings by the American children, produced under the guidance of the New York University Clinic for Gifted Children, are simply tremendous. One fifteen year old boy showed he was familiar with Salvador Dali's work in his painting of a soldier disemboweled on barbed wire, while thirteen-year-old David Simonson proudly displayed his picture of a soldier protecting a woman from an advancing tank. "The woman at the soldier's feet," he announced, "is Civilization." After this cavalcade of American art, the Life editors seemed a little nonplussed by the British efforts, and evidently felt the need to introduce the more prosaic designs by the British children with a warning note about their "childish zest in wartime gadgets . . . fantastic bombing planes and anti-aircraft guns." Tempting as it is to draw some first comments out of this transatlantic difference, it is actually the last picture in the article that draws the eye. After all of the familiar allegories and pictures of fantastic weaponry, it seems strangely out of place: " 'Burning of the Books' is by Gert Keller, 15, son of British parents who lived in Germany from Hitler's rise until three years ago. Gert's painting has elements of satire with the three brown-shirt troopers saluting the bonfire, and soldier at right strutting in his too-big uniform. Sign over door at left means Jews not admitted." On the left, three almost indistinguishable troopers in brown shirts turn toward the central bonfire, forming a barrier that visually confirms the exclusion of the Jews from the building behind them. To the right, an armed SS soldier smiles as he holds back a crowd whose simplistic facial expressions depict a range of emotions from dismay to curiosity. Toward the back one spectator is clearly smiling.

From our perspective, the picture seems perfectly appropriate, not least because it appears a visually faultless record of the infamous burning of the books on the Opernplatz.² It is a neat match with the well-known images of grinning students hurling books onto bonfires that are accorded such a central place in the historiography of the Third Reich...