Heinrich Heine, arguably one of the most famous of German authors, had prophetically announced that wherever they burn books, they will one day burn humans.
German cultural production, as is well known, in the decades leading to Nazidom set about creating a ‘national’ culture by destroying Jewish, communist, humanist and other artwork, banishing the artists and making it impossible for any artist who did not toe the Nazi line to even live. As the edict of September 22, 1933 phrased it, there was the very real possibility of the ‘legal prosecution of all tendencies in art and literature of a kind likely to disintegrate our life as a nation’. The instrumentalisation of the literary was to be in the interests of the ‘new’ nation.
The Nazification of the literary field was effected through a multi-pronged approach: crafting principles and theories of literature, the large-scale proscription and destruction of authors and texts seen as detrimental to the national project, and the management of institutions.
On February 4, 1933, German President von Hindenburg issued the ‘Decree for the Protection of the German People’ in which a full section was devoted to ‘printed publications’. It said: ‘publications the content of which is apt to endanger public security or order’ had to be confiscated, destroyed or proscribed.
Publishers came under the scanner and anything that vaguely resembled anti-national or anti-Nazi – and these were interchangeable, where any criticism of the Party or its Leader (always with an uppercase L) was deemed to be a criticism of the nation – was immediately banned, with publishers being told that ‘supplying and distributing the works named is undesirable for national and cultural reasons and must therefore cease’.
Two months later, on May 4, 1933, Germany saw the first organised book burnings, including those by Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Franz Kafka, among others. Later, writings by Thomas Mann and H.G. Wells were also targeted under a campaign that came to be called ‘Action Against the Un-German Spirit’ (an experiment to be recreated in the USA in the McCarthy era). The book-burnings – propelled by the speeches delivered by Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda – were grand spectacles. These were projected as signs of the cleansing Germany needed of Jewish and other ‘un-German’ traditions, which included communism, pacifism and other ‘contaminating ideologies’.
Later, of course, burning books was deemed inadequate to the task of national cleansing and numerous authors were murdered for good measure. The book trade and publishing were tightly monitored, and the books supplied to the readers (including the army at the war front) were carefully put together by Goebbels’ bureaucracy. A declaration of loyalty to the new regime had to be signed, and writers like Mann who refused, had to go into exile. As Johannes Evelein notes in Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany (2014), Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Elias Canetti and other exiles treated their condition as a ‘high moral office’ necessitated by Nazism…..
https://thewire.in/history/burning-books-and-the-nazification-of-literature
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