A Point of View: Reflections on Nazi book burning 75 years later

Seventy-five years ago  -- a mere 100 days after Hitler rose to power -- a series of organized book burnings took place throughout Germany. The Nazi assault on reason, and the Jews, had begun.

As I write this from Israel, ten days after commemorating Yam Hashoah, I don't want to let this day pass without thinking about what this fateful event meant to European Jewry and what it means for us today.

I'm sure you have seen the pictures. On May 10, 1933, perhaps the most notable bonfire was the one that took place on Berlin's Opernplatz - Opera House Square -- opposite Humboldt University. This was the fruit of a month-long campaign by the German Student Association to "cleanse" German language and literature. The mission of these right-wing rabble rousers was in line with Joseph Goebbels's propaganda machinery on behalf of the Reich.

More than 20,000 books and journals, and about 5,000 images, all representing "insidious" Jewish influence, were torched by students and Nazi storm troopers. Enthusiastic crowds witnessed this feverish destruction of "un-German" writings which had been systematically pilfered from libraries, public buildings, private offices, and citizen's homes.

We know that similar "ceremonies" took place in some 30 German university towns. We know that torchlight parades were punctuated with speeches railing against "Jewish intellectualism" and calling for the purification of German culture. We know that writings by such Jewish intellectuals as Einstein and Freud fueled the flames, alongside German texts by Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, and volumes by international writers including Dos Passos, Hemingway, Zola, Proust, and even Helen Keller.

The Nazis made no distinction between hating Jews for religious or "racial" reasons and for so-called "impure" cultural ones. If Jews were historically the "People of the Book," German fascists were as zealous in their hatred of the Torah as they were toward Jewish intellectual thought that grew in the fertile soil of the late Renaissance and the European Enlightenment. 

From the Talmud and other books of Jewish learning, to Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, and Vienna's own Sigmund Freud, Jewish powers of reasoning were spread by the printed word. For a vast number of anti-Semitic Germans, however, Jewish thought was poisonous simply because it was produced by Jews and because it was considered "cosmopolitan," ushering in a dangerous modern world that challenged a mystical and medieval German romanticism in favor of new ideas.

The book burnings were a totalitarian attack on all of dynamic modern culture and on democratic ideals of pluralism, and was an early warning of what lay ahead for European Jewry that went largely unheeded by the civilized world.

I'm sorry to say that this is not such ancient history. On the American scene, we continue to see books attacked by self-appointed censors and removed from library shelves, while internationally, fatwas are issued against authors and cartoonists.

As Jews, we know only too well the importance and power of words. The gas chambers did not begin with bricks - they began with words. Ugly, hateful words that demonized, degraded, and debased Jews. And those words became ugly, hateful deeds.

But the notion that we must throw books on a bonfire or remove them from shelves, and in that way eliminate ideas and, symbolically, authors, is to break faith with reason. 

Of course, the Nazis believed fanatically in the danger of reason or unfamiliar ideas - and the Jew was the eternal conveyor of "foreign" ideas which had to be rooted out of German culture. Let's remember the period:  there was no Internet then. Communication was all about books, newspapers, periodicals, radio, and the moving pictures. First the Nazis tried to limit acceptable communication to what they deemed appropriately "German." Then they judged most of modern art "degenerate," including a modern master like Marc Chagall, and damned Mondrian in favor of the merely kitsch Arno Brecker. After all, to the Nazis modern art was "Jewish Bolshevist." And as for the movies, they could find no better idolater than Leni Riefenstahl, an evil genius if ever there was one.

That fateful night of May 10, 1933 ushered in one of the darkest chapters in Jewish history. It was, of course, just a portent of things to come. We've all seen the pictures and the newsreels. The sparks and flames that reached into the night sky lit the faces of gleeful looters and arsonists, incipient sadists, and ideological true believers. With smug satisfaction, Goebbels said, "The flames not only illuminate the end of the old era, they also light up the new."

Let's also remember that fueling the fire that night were works by Heinrich Heine, the 19th Century German lyric poet born of an assimilated Jewish family. With chilling prescience, Heine had a century before written, "Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people."