The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation

Chapter I - The Nazi Attack on “Un-German” Literature, 1933–1945

I • THE NAZI ATTACK ON “UN-GERMAN” LITERATURE, – Leonidas E. Hill SCHOLARS continue to debate the actual and symbolic meaning of the public burnings of books on  May , the “Action against the Un-German Spirit.” Scarcely anyone disputes that the book burnings deserve mention with the Reichstag fire and the boycott of Jewish businesses as among the most striking features of the first months of the Hitler regime. But it was students rather than the new government of the Third Reich who planned and staged these events. Should they still be regarded as symbolic of Nazi cultural policy as they were during the s and World War II? Was this attack on the “un-German” actually a reflection of Nazi racial policies? The Nazis’ vicious anti-Semitism and the book burnings made some observers worry that Jews would be burned next. Heinrich Heine was often quoted: “There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.”1 Yet the world reaction was somewhat ambiguous: it combined indignation and condemnation with a propensity to view the burnings as mere student highjinks, in bad taste but a unique occurrence. The stronger international reaction to the boycott made the still vulnerable Nazi regime temporarily cautious. Hence the cultural implications of the  book burnings and book bannings remained unclear for a few years. The various states in Germany designed their own censorship policies and implemented them differently. This chaotic situation ended with the centralization of cultural and racial policy and the introduction of more radical policies. A brief caesura during the  Olympic year was followed by accelerated aggressiveness. After the takeover of Austria in March  and the Kristallnacht pogrom the following November, the Nazis indulged their appetites for plunder and brutality and fulfilled the expectations of their most acute critics by destroying both books and Jews. The destruction was limited compared with the holocaust of books and human beings during the Second World War, but it revealed more fully the crimes implicit in Nazi ideology. The  May  book burnings became a powerful symbol of German “barbarism” and helped focus resistance to nazism outside Germany. Only now, however, is the profundity of Heine’s perception clear: the burnings of  are an appropriate symbol for and anticipation of the wartime extermination of Jews and Slavs. The “My Life in Germany” collection of autobiographies at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, vividly illuminates the experiences of German authors, publishers , booksellers, and readers during the continually expanding Nazi war against everything “un-German.” Two manifestos from April , the “Twelve Theses against the Un-German Spirit” and the “Feuersprüche” (fire incantations), read and chanted at the burnings , are exemplary distillations of the Nazis’ viewpoint. But what were the sources of their belief in and hatred of the “un-German,” and how did they define that term? Romanticism, nationalism, racism, social Darwinism, and antimodernism were the pillars of National Socialist cultural policy. From romanticism came the conviction that peoples expressed their special Geist (spirit or genius) in their language, literature, and customs. Early nineteenth-century conservative romanticism rejected Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and the egalitarian ideas of . The wars of German unification and the First World War provided an infusion of militarism and chauvinism. The anti-Western nationalism of the German “ideas of ” was hostile to democracy and parliamentarism and was a baneful force in the Weimar Republic. Nazism combined these elements with assertions of German superiority based on “race,” characterized especially by “blood,” meaning genealogy rather than conventional blood types or genetics. Although the Nazis considered Jews and Slavs racially inferior, they believed that only a colossal social Darwinistic struggle could prevent the conspiracy of Jewish capitalists and financiers from gaining economic control of the globe, and the conspiracy of Jewish Bolsheviks from fomenting world revolution. In preparation for this struggle National Socialists would end the political and social disunity of the hated Weimar Republic and build a politically, socially, racially, economically, and militarily strong Germany. They intended to liquidate the political parties of the Jews and their allies in the liberal center as well as on the socialist and communist left; to dissolve classes and unite all Germans in the new discipline of Gemeinschaft ; to purify society through eugenic policies, the sterilization of “colored” and “mentally deficient” people, and the extrusion of Jews and Slavs, who on racial grounds were non-Germans; to regain control of the economy from the Jews, whom they accused of dominating banking, the professions, the universities , publishing, and...