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Books Never Die
- 1. Books Never Die: The Life and Legacy of the American Library of Nazi Banned Books Jennifer M. Meacham
- 3. “Where they burn books . . .” (“Twelve theses against the un-German spirit”)
- 4. Kafka Marx London Wells Sandburg Freud Brecht Hemingway Sanger Remarque Keller
- 5. Brooklyn Jewish Center 667 Eastern Parkway c. 1920 Source: http://www.crownheights.info/index.php?itemid=29474 “Books cannot be killed by fire.”
- 6. Durant Dreiser Sinclair Einstein
- 7. American Library of Nazi Banned Books inaugural ceremony Brooklyn Jewish CenterDecember 22, 1934 Source: http://burningbookspalgrave.blogspot.com/2008/05/brooklyn-nazi-banned-library-opened-by.html
- 8. “Books are weapons in the war of ideas.”
- 10. “People die, but books never die.” Source: commons.wikimedia.org Plaque commemorating the Nazi Bookfires Frankfurt City Hall Hesse, Germany
- 11. Bibliography Bosmajian, H. (2006). Burning books. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc. Fishburn, M. (2007). Books are weapons: Wartime responses to the Nazi bookfires of 1933. Book History, 10, 223-251. Retrieved from Wilson OmniFile. Fishburn, M. (2008). Burning books. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hill, L. E. (2001). The Nazi attack on “un-German” literature, 1933-1945. In J. Rose (Ed.), The Holocaust and the book (pp. 9-46). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Hillerbrand, H. J. (2006). On book burnings and book burners: Reflections on the power (and powerlessness) of ideas. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 74 (3), 593-614. Retrieved from http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/content/74/3/593 Kantorowicz. A. (1934). Why a library of the burned books? London: Mackay. Kantorowicz. A. (1944, May 7). The burned books still live. New York Times Magazine, 17, 43. Knuth, R. (2006.) Burning books and leveling libraries: Extremist violence and cultural destruction. Westport, CT: Praeger. Prof. Einstein dedicates Nazi-banned libraries. (1946) In Jubilee book of the Brooklyn Jewish Center: published in commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of its founding (pp. 25-27). Brooklyn: Brooklyn Jewish Center. Retrieved from http://burningbookspalgrave.blogspot.com/ Stern, G. (1985). The burning of books in Nazi Germany, 1933: The American response. Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, 2. Retrieved from http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/ pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=395007 Stern, G. (1987). The book burning, the exiles, the American public. In P.E.N. International. Symposium Exile U.S.A., March 20-21, 1985 (pp. 25-32). Schriesheim, Germany: Frank Albrecht. Retrieved from http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/ bookburning/stern1.php von Merveldt, N. (2007). Books cannot be killed by fire: The German Freedom Library and the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books as agents of cultural memory. Library Trends, 55 (3), 523-535. Retrieved from Academic OneFile.
Editor's Notes
- In 1942 the newly created United States Office of War Information published and distributed posters with a powerful message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The two dominant themes are conveyed at the beginning and end of the message: “Books cannot be killed by fire”; “People die, but books never die” convey the permanence of the ideas within books, even in the face of their physical destruction (which is also depicted in the poster). And “Books are weapons in the war of ideas”: to destroy them is to attack free speech and democracy, and to defiantly preserve them, even in the face of intolerance, is to stand and defend the rights of a free people.<br>While these words undoubtedly elicit a range of images and emotions from a 21st century audience looking back at the war through the lens of history, their strength at the time came from the still fresh memory of an event that for so many evoked yet another powerful phrase -- the prophetic words of 19th century poet and playwright Heinrich Heine: “Where they burns books, they will also burn people.”<br>Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 led to, among other things, the suspension of citizens’ civil liberties and tight censorship of any and all publications deemed unfriendly to the new regime. In support of the government (and with its explicit support), National Socialist student organizations waged a propaganda campaign against their perceived enemies that culminated in the infamous Nazi book burnings of May 10, 1933.
- The students’ campaign began a month earlier with the dissemination of the so-called “12 theses against the un-German sprit,” which spelled out the values of their movement, among them: “Jewish writings are to be published in Hebrew. If they appear in German, they must be identified as translations. . . The un-German spirit is to be eradicated from public libraries.” “We demand of German students the desire and capability to overcome Jewish intellectualism and the resulting liberal decay in the German spirit.”<br>An estimated 25,000 books were tossed into bonfires at dozens of German universities while loyal followers of Nazi ideology marched in support, cheered the flames, and condemned to the ashes the physical form of the very ideas responsible for what they saw as the deterioration of their pure German state.
- Among the authors targeted were both the obscure and the famous, German and foreign-born, Jew and Christian. Of course a great number of the books were condemned to the flames due to their “Jewish” nature, but many others were denounced as pacifist, Marxist, socialist, subversive, immoral, or simply “un-German” (Bosmajian, 199).
- In the immediate aftermath of the book burnings, groups in both Europe and the United States organized to bring together many of the titles banned, confiscated, and destroyed by the Nazis. Within a year of the conflagration, a group of German exiles living in Paris opened the German Freedom Library, which housed copies of works banned and destroyed by the Nazi party as well as tens of thousands of examples of Nazi hate speech in the form of newspaper clippings and National Socialist propaganda.<br>While in the States a similar project was undertaken, not by a group of German immigrants or an American university or library, but by the Brooklyn Jewish Center. In April 1934 the organizers published a list of banned authors and “called on members and friends of the center to donate books or funds” (von Merveldt, p. 528). Alongside the call for support, an editorial in the Brooklyn Jewish Center Review explained that the purpose of an institution like the German Freedom Library and what would come to be known as the American Library of Nazi Banned Books was “to preserve, in readily accessible collections, all books which the Nazis outlawed in Germany. They are to preserve these cultural contributions to the world, and at the same time remain monuments both to the men and women who created them and to the barbarity of those who, with medieval fanaticism, burned them” (Prof. Einstein dedicates, p. 25)
- Support for the venture grew quickly, within the Jewish-American community and beyond. Among the first members of the library’s Advisory Board were American authors Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Will Durant, and Princeton Professor Albert Einstein. An interesting note on Will Durant: At the time he was asked to join the board of the Library of Nazi Banned Books, half of the royalties from his most famous work The Story of Philosophy were coming from its German edition. Despite the obvious financial risk, he accepted the post, commenting, “Presumably the sale of my books will be stopped in Germany if I put my name on your list. Nevertheless I think the little sacrifice ought to be made” (Stern, 1987)
- The official opening of the Library was planned for the second anniversary of the book burnings, May 1935, but an inaugural dinner was held on December 22, 1934 in the auditorium of the Brooklyn Jewish Center. Before a crowd of nearly 500, Albert Einstein delivered the inaugural address. “I hail the establishment,” he said, “of a library which should snatch from oblivion these . . . products which were banned only because of their human qualities, and to create for them a new center of influence” (qtd. in Stern, 1987). <br>By protecting the works of banned authors the members of the Brooklyn Jewish Center and organizers of the Library of Nazi Banned Books showed their commitment to the most democratic American values: freedom of thought and freedom of expression. After hearing a 1934 speech by banned German-Jewish author Heinz Liepmann, someone identifying himself by his initials and as a “Negro” wrote a letter to the Brooklyn Jewish Center Review in support of the efforts to obtain and preserve copies of banned books. He said, “If we all fight together, not with weapons, but with the privilege of every citizen then, and only then can we blot this awful blur on history’s records. Voting, keeping active in our political circles, being conscious of what’s happening around us, these are our weapons. Arm yourselves immediately – Make right the wrong done” (qtd. in von Merveldt, 530). The preservation of the books was their weapon against the tyranny and oppression of a regime that sought to erase whole slices of history from the world’s collective memory.--Image source: http://burningbookspalgrave.blogspot.com/2008/05/brooklyn-nazi-banned-library-opened-by.html
- Little was written about the Library of Nazi Banned Books after World War II. Perhaps the triumph of the books saved was, understandably, overshadowed by the tragedy of the lives lost. The subsequent decade also ushered in its own era of government sponsored censorship with Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade, possibly casting a new and unfavorable light on a collection that included the works of many communist writers.
- The Brooklyn Jewish Center closed in the late 1970s, and the exact whereabouts of the collection of Nazi-banned books is unclear. An article published in 2007 states that the Library’s holdings were donated to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. However, according to one of the Seminary’s librarians, while the records of the Brooklyn Jewish Center are housed at the Seminary’s archives, they have no record of the banned books collection. <br>The memory of the Library does live on, however, in a traveling exhibit of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum called “Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings.” (http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/bookburning/) The exhibit is co-curated by Dr. Guy Stern, Professor Emeritus at Wayne State University and Director of the Harry and Wanda Zekelman International Institute of the Righteous at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills. The exhibit includes a copy of Einstein’s inaugural speech from 1934 and articles written about the Library, but, sadly, none of the actual books from the collection.
- In the course of my research into this time and place in America’s history, I have gone from a state of intense frustration over the mysterious whereabouts of these books (I am a librarian and I hate when I can’t find the answer to a question) to a feeling that there may be something slightly poetic, though sad, about their disappearance, as of course their significance outlives the physical existence of any single volume, or even an entire collection. It is the ideas that must be preserved, with or without their physical manifestations. In a time of war against ideas and the individuals and groups who possess them, the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books stood as a symbol of peaceful defiance and preservation: preservation of the cultural memory the Nazis strove to wipe out of existence; preservation of what cannot be taken away from human beings, even in the face of all that can.