Paper Salvage: Mein Kampf

The wartime paper shortages were not always without their comedy, as with this image from Britain, which crossed the Atlantic to be published in the New York Times in November 1941. Paper salvage drives were routine across Britain, where "sorters" looked through the great tonnes of books to make sure that nothing considered valuable was lost. It's easy to imagine that this would have been a rather grim business, but equally, not without its chances for comedy. This photograph, for example, is rather cheeky, as the sorters lounge on a pile of copies of Mein Kampf, donated as waste paper. Although not quite a book burning, it's quite clear that the pulping machines have a certain charm. And it's absolutely certain that the machines were considered fascinating: they were often set up in town squares or the like, so that the good burghers could wander past for a look. Bands and speeches were not, of course, considered good form.

1933: Paul Tillich

Not many contemporaries actually gave an account of what it was like to attend the 1933 bookfires in Germany. One person who did was the theologian Paul Tillich, who witnessed the fires in Frankfurt am Main. In May 1942, as book burning began to be adopted as one of the standards of Allied propaganda, Tillich took part in a broadcast for the ‘Voice of America’ program (at least, Tillich wrote the piece: the actual broadcast was read out by an actor). The piece, which was broadcast in Germany as well as the United States, is worth quoting at length:

“Many of you still have a picture in your minds of the events of that day. I myself experienced them from a particularly good vantage point and I would like to describe how the scene impressed me. It was in Frankfort on the Main. We stood at a window of the Römer, the ancient building where German emperors were crowned. On the square, which dates back to the Middle Ages, masses of people pushed forward, held back by black and brown shirts. A woodpile was set up. Then we saw a torchlight procession pouring out of the narrow streets, an ending file of students and party men in uniforms. The light of the torches flickered through the darkness and lit up the gables of the houses. I was reminded of paintings of the Spanish Inquisition. Finally, a wheelbarrow or cart drawn by two oxen jolted or stumbled over the cobblestones, laden with books which had been selected for the offering. Behind the wheelbarrow strode the student pastor. When he halted before the stake, he climbed up and stood on top of the wheelbarrow and delivered the damning speech. He threw the first book on the burning woodpile. Hundreds of other books followed. The flames darted upward and lit up the dream picture that was the present. Time had run backward for two hundred years.”

In 1945 Tillich was temporarily blacklisted by the US Army because of his membership in the Council for a Democratic Germany, one of many such coalitions of left-leaning intellectuals set up by German exiles during the war.

Burning manuscripts: do the world a good turn

Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673), the Duchess of Newcastle, was a writer and a celebrity, famous for her velvet-clad coachmen and her “hair about her ears”, as a clearly smitten Samuel Pepys noted in his diary (Pepys was one of hundreds who followed her about London, delighted with her extravagance). Pepys was even part of the group who hosted her at the Royal Society, where she admired some flashy experiments. She was immune to most scientific figuring, nonetheless, publishing her wonderful Observations upon Experimental Philosophy in 1666, in which she criticised the new science as the idle hobby of schoolboys. She dismissed, for instance, the new-fangled microscope as an instrument which merely showed the surface of things, rather than their causes. When told that the microscope revealed the common housefly to be the proud owner of hundreds of eyes, Cavendish was appalled: “if two eyes be stronger than a thousand, then nature is to be blamed that she gives such number of eyes to so little a creature.”
She was a poet, an aristocrat, a utopian, and a philosopher. All the more charming that in her Poems, and Fancies (1653), she begins with a brief envoi called ‘The Poetresses hasty Resolution’, in which she is admonished by Reason:

For shame leave off, sayd shee, the Printer spare,
Hee’le loose by your ill Poetry, I feare
Besides the World hath already such a weight
Of uselesse Bookes, as it is over fraught.
Then pitty take, doe the World a good turne,
And all you write cast in the fire, and burne.

Reason, of course, was no match for Cavendish, who dispatched her verse to the Printer with all possible haste.

Paper Salvage: has its limits

During the Second World War paper was a much straitened commodity. As a result, paper recycling and salvage drives, around the world but particularly in the United States and to an even greater extent in Great Britain, were commonplace. Among the great swathes of newsprint that were recycled, literally tens of millions of books were also pulped at this time, although most were committed to the machines only after being vetted by volunteers and librarians, who extracted rare and useful items and put them aside, usually donating the salvaged books to libraries, or sending them to POWs. This photograph, which I stumbled across in Life magazine for May 1944, makes an unusual counterpoint, but is also one of very few photos I have ever found of the good guys burning any sort of written material: even confidential papers, as here.

The Mortal Storm

A hit for MGM in mid-1940 was the boilover anti-Nazi film The Mortal Storm, starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. It was based on the 1937 novel of the same name by Phyllis Bottome and featured a family of left-leaning assimilated Jewish intellectuals being squeezed out of German society, a position exacerbated when the daughter Freya falls for a sturdy peasant boy with strong Communist beliefs. It's not a bad read, all things considered, but it is the novel's conversion to film that is particularly interesting, because the latter included an influential book burning scene. In the novel, the elderly professor suffers the indignity of having his personal library vetted by stromtroopers, who confiscate a handful of blacklisted works. The scene, that is, shows the insidious effects of censorship extending into the personal home.
In the MGM film, however, there's a very different agenda, as this photo-essay from Life makes clear. In an important sequence, the director Frank Borzage pans from the professor having his class disrupted by noisy brown-shirted students, to the scene pictured prominently here, in which uniformed hordes burn books. The scene, which borrows heavily from the original newsreel footage, is probably one of the more accurate recreations of the events, right down to the inclusion of the "fire incantations". In particular, having the scene framed from the perspective of the sympathetic Professor helps shape the response to the meaning of the book burnings: significant, because it was only later in the war years that book burning became one of the most potent symbols of anti-Nazi propaganda.

Egypt's Culture Minister on "Israeli books"

Playing with metaphors of book burning is still politically fraught, particularly in the Middle East. Recently, Egypt’s Culture Minister Faruq Hosni, a liberal and touted as a candidate to head UNESCO, has drawn fire from writers and diplomats for proclaiming in parliament on 10 May 2008: “I’d burn Israeli books myself if I found any in libraries in Egypt," in reply to questioning from an opposition MP (Hosni, it can be assumed, may not have been aware that this was the 75th anniversary of the original Nazi bookfires in Berlin).
As would be expected of any sure-footed politician, Hosni has since suggested that his remark needs to be put in perspective, but this has not stopped the Simon Wiesenthal Centre writing to UNESCO suggesting that as a “literary pyromaniac” he may not be the man for the top job. Hosni, it's apparent, regrets the remark, and later told AFP that he had merely used “a popular expression to prove something does not exist… A minister of culture cannot demand that a book be burnt, and that includes an Israeli book.”
(There are several reports online; here chiefly from the report published on the European Jewish Press website, written by Alain Navarro, 23 May 2008).

Burning Textbooks (2007?)

The habit of burning books to mark some special event has particular resonance for students. It's possible to find stories about rowdy youngsters burning their textbooks in newspaper archives, but even easier to type "burning books" into YouTube and see what happens. Generally, the tone is forced and the grinning sheepish: it's fairly easy to conclude that the videos say more about group psychology than the death of literature.

Smoking books: Ronald Searle

The British cartoonist Ronald Searle, known for his St. Trinians' cartoons and for his work on the Nigel Molesworth books ("A gerund left out. No place for it in one of my sentences."), was a prisoner of war in Burma and Changi during the Second World War. During this time, through illness and malnutrition, he went from 11 to 7 stone. Well-known are his sketches from this period, many executed with a burnt-match on whatever scraps of paper were to hand, and often hidden from the guards by leaving them under the bodies of those who had died of disease.
Like many POWs he was an avid smoker, but cigarette paper was at a premium. He would smoke the blank corners of his drawings, newspapers, and even, after he had read it five times, half of Pickwick Papers (but which half? Searle is mute on this subject).
Another book to be enjoyed twice, as it were, was Rose Macaulay's Minor Pleasures of Life. Many years later he met Macaulay, and "told her I had been able to add a further minor pleasure to her anthology. Sad to say she was not amused, looked me up and down with distaste and turned her back to talk to someone more respectable. Dickens, I feel, would have been more understanding."

Disposable books

In tension with the rather formal idea of burning books, which is often a very dread and serious business, there is the everyday disregard for the book as an object. Examples abound. Napoleon on campaign was rumoured to have thrown novels out the carriage window as he finished them, making, one biographer commented, his expeditions into a sort of impromptu paper-chase. Edward Fitzgerald would cut out sections of books which he disliked and bind up the remainder, while Charles Darwin was even more slipshod, and would routinely cut up books to make them more convenient, holding the battered fragments together with metal clips. A famous neurologist called Hughlings Jackson was known for sending relevant or interesting sections to friends, but also for cutting railway novels in half, so that he could be evenly weighted down, one half in the left pocket, the other in the right. Undoubtedly my favourite, the horror of all book-collectors, is the tale that Shelley would use the flyleaves of books, if nothing else was to hand, to make paper boats.
For many years I have been spreading the rumour that novelist Ford Madox Ford used bacon rashers as bookmarks while at the breakfast table, but I have conveniently forgotten the source of this no-doubt libelous story. It is true, however, that Wordsworth would open his books with a used bread-and-butter knife.

Library of the Burned Books: 10 May 1934

The Library of the Burned Books, a project of German exiles and anti-Nazi writers in Paris in 1934, was opened in time for the first anniversary of the first bookfires, on 10 May 1934. This snapshot was taken during the course of the evening when speeches were given by prominent exiles and supporters. Here, standing on the chair for his speech, is Magnus Hirschfeld, the erstwhile head of a sexual research institute in Berlin (he is considered a sort of precursor to the work of, for instance, Kinsey in the 1950s). His institute was deliberately targeted, and largely destroyed by uniformed students and Nazi functionaries. Fortunately, Hirschfeld was abroad at the time of the attacks, and he never returned to Germany.
The man standing to his immediate right, in three-quarter profile, appears to be Alfred Kantorowicz, the Library's head.

Velimir Khlebnikov

The Russian Futurist poet Khlebinkov was known by his friends to have been pathologically careless with his own manuscripts: Mayakovsky described how he had a habit of filling a pillow case full of papers, and then losing it. Even his great 'Incantation by Laughter' was rumoured to have been salvaged from the floor by his friend David Burliuk.
Moreover, Raymond Cooke has described how for Khlebnikov, the act of burning books or manuscripts evolved into a complex, but usually anti-authoritarian, gesture. In the comic poem ‘Malusha’s Granddaughter’ he calls for a ‘joyous fire’ to be made from the books which are tormenting young people like ‘fierce chains of penance’ - “thus does he characterize Marxist literature” wrote the critic Boris Yakolev in his attack New World (1948). Nor did he just attack Marxist writers like Kautsky and Bebel, but a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a historian, a medical bacteriologist, and so on: the line is ‘vse gorite! / Ogney slovami - govorite!’ (which Cooke translates as: ‘ all burn away! In words of fire - have your say!’
The ritual burning of books turned into something of a particular theme for Khlebnikov. In ‘Conversation Between Two’ (1913) a brief attack on Immanuel Kant turns into a more general call for book burning: “I long for a great bonfire of books. Yellow sparks, rapid fire, translucent ash which disintegrates when touched or even breathed upon, ash on which it is still possible to make out individual lines, words of boasting or arrogance, - all this is transformed into a black, beautiful flower, illuminated by fire from within, grown from the book of people, as the flowers of nature grow from the book of the earth.”
Raymond Cooke, Velimir Khlebnikov: A critical study (Cambridge University Press, 1987)

Louvain: "They Burned the Books"

One of the benchmarks of book burning in wartime propaganda was Stephen Vincent Bénet's enormously popular radioplay, They Burned the Books. Commissioned by the Council on Books in Wartime, and first performed in 1942, it became a staple of anti-Nazi popular expression, particularly on the tenth anniversary of the first major Nazi bookfires in 1943.

It had a contemporary release as a small booklet, but this image comes from a collected edition of Bénet's work, We Stand United of 1945. Although no caption is given, it is interesting to note that the image is evidently meant to represent the new library at Louvain, rebuilt and opened in 1928, in flames.

Burning Manuscripts: W. Somerset Maugham

Ted Morgan's biography of Somerset Maugham includes this wonderful description of the author making his own decisions about what to preserve from a lifetime of writing:
“He and his secretary, Alan Searle, held a series of ‘bonfire nights’ in the large stone fireplace in the drawing room of the Villa Mauresque in 1958. Piles of letters were thrown in, as well as some of Maugham’s manuscripts. Searle - horrified to see so much valuable material go up in smoke - tried to rescue choice items. Coming down to breakfast after a bonfire night, Maugham would rub his hands and tell Searle: “That was a good night’s work. Now we’ll burn everything you’ve hidden under the sofa.”

1933: 'Berlin Savant explains why books were burned'

At the end of 1933, six months after the initial rush of book burnings in Germany, Frederick Schonemann of the University of Berlin spoke at the Chicago council on foreign relations. The crowd was apparently already fractious when someone questioned him from the floor regarding the burning of the books. Schonemann’s reply was salutary: regarding the books burnt, he commented blithely, “a tremendous flood of books on nudism and of a general pornographic nature unfit for either juvenile or adult reading had inundated Germany, and these were burned. I am sorry to say”, he continued, “that the authors of many - of a majority - were Jewish.”
These cheap dismissals were met with more yelling from the crowd, including shouts about the fate of the books of writers such as Helen Keller and Albert Einstein. Schonemann showed he would be swayed neither by emotion nor facts: “No foreign books were burned. I think I am correct in saying that none of Miss Keller’s volumes was included.”
Kathleen McLaughlin, ‘Hecklers shout disapproval of Hitler defender. Berlin Savant explains why books were burned,’ New York Times, 15 November 1933

Richard Le Gallienne, poet and man of letters

“The whole question of censorship is, of course, difficult, but in view of the contemporary orgy of dirt in literature no one who possesses literary nostrils, so to speak, will deny the need of calling a halt in some way or another. A recourse to the old-fashioned ‘common hangman,’ or to the guillotine, for certain recent books and magazines and their authors and editors as well would, I am sure, gratify many readers who are far from squeamish and would be all to the good of the public health and public decency. Meanwhile the valiant action of Mrs. Bernard Shaw (cited by Mr. Jackson) in burning her copy of Frank Harris’ ‘My Life and Loves,’ “lest the servants should read it,” deserves a wide currency and imitation.”
Richard Le Gallienne, ‘Mr. Jackson on ‘The Fear of Books,’ New York Times, 25 September 1932

Burning Textbooks (1907)

In June 1907, on the so-called 'South Field' between W 115th and 116th, Amsterdam and Broadway (New York), the class of 1909 at Columbia held a graduation party. “At 8:30 o’clock the class marched into the field, and the piles of textbooks were brought out in due state. Hal Taylor made the speech, and the books were piled on a kerosene-soaked heap. Then the class of 1909 danced about uttering aboriginal cries that go with such celebrations.” A passing man, the story continues, alerted the fire department. They duly doused the fire, although hampered by some of the students, who tried to make off with the hose.
‘Firemen Douse Students. Columbia Sophomores’ Book-Burning Ceremonies Have Wet Ending,’ New York Times, 1 June 1907, p. 1
Interestingly enough, the South Field is now the square in front of the "Butler Library", which opened in 1934. The Library was named in honour of Nicholas Murray Butler, educator and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who was a vocal and influential supporter of both attempts to rebuild Louvain University Library after it was burned in 1914 and 1940.

Burning Textbooks (1937)

“In place of the age-old custom of burning the books out on the street, which is surrounded by a great deal of shrubbery and foliage, a community sing will be substituted, Daniel Feins, chairman of the numeral lights committee, announced. Feins explained that because of the fire hazard and because of a growing lack of interest in the book-burning celebration, it was to be abandoned this year in favor of a community sing.”
‘City College Lists Busy Finals Week', New York Times, 6 June 1937, p. 49

Louvain: The Library of Louvain University, burnt in 1914.

The burning of the University of Louvain in August 1914 was one of the most infamous events of the First World War, and although debate raged over who was responsible (German soldiers, or retreating Allied forces, depending on which side you asked), the Library became a propaganda symbol of the excesses of German "incendiarism". Many books and pamphlets were published denouncing the crime: this image of the burnt-out shell of part of the library is from a small booklet published in 1915 by Paul Delannoy, a professor and librarian at the University of Louvain. His book, L’Université de Louvain: Conferences données au College de France en février 1915 (Paris: 1915) is an anti-German polemic, and he calls the destruction of the library, burnt during the German advance through Belgium in 1914, an "eternal stigma" to German militarism, and hopes that the rebuilding of the library will represent the triumph of "right over force, of civilisation over barbarism".

Hanif Kureishi, 'So what would you burn?' (New Statesman, 13 December 2004)

Jonathan Swift, 'On burning a Dull Poem' (1729)

Chicago 1928: "Big Bill" burns "Pro-British" books

1920s Chicago mayor 'Big Bill’ Thompson had been an outspoken critic of American intervention in the First World War (earning him the nickname ‘Kaiser Bill’). During the 1920s his anti-British stance developed to the point that he regularly expressed a standing offer to punch King George ‘on the snoot’ if he ever dared visit Illinois. In 1928 Thompson, acting on a tip-off from the self-styled ‘Patriots’ League’, deputed his friend U.J. ‘Sport’ Herrmann to take four of the most invidious pro-British books to the shores of the lake and torch them. Although it is not even absolutely clear whether the books were eventually destroyed or merely quarantined, Big Bill's posturing was the delight of pundits and cartoonists: here Thompson and his mate Herrmann light their pipes on the 'Lamp of Wisdom'.
Intriguingly, Herrmann was a famed philanthropist, who once lent the same library a quarter of a million dollars. He stayed on the library board after 1928, and became its president in 1933. He is reputed to have told Big Bill that he would help destroy the pro-British books, so long as he wasn't forced to actually read them. Many people have tried to make something of the fact that his yacht was named the 'Swastika', but I will resist.

Paper Salvage: "though the burning of books remains the most perverse gesture", H.D.

H.D.'s wonderful poem was published in 1944, and is the most insightful comment on one of the ironies of wartime propaganda: that book burning was being pilloried as the hallmark of the barbarian, but that paper was so scarce that millions of books were being patriotically pulped.

Anti-Japan protests, The Economist 2005

Veit Harlan and "Jud Suess"

Ian Rankin, 'So what would you burn?' (New Statesman, 13 December 2004)

Jerry Doyle cartoon, May 1943

Salman Rushdie & Absolut Vodka

I can't remember where I actually came across this advertisement -- I have a vague memory that it was in the Sydney Morning Herald supplement, the 'Good Weekend', about 4 or 5 years ago. Whatever the case, it's a striking addition to the famous series of Absolut vodka advertisements, showing Rushdie is willing, on occasion, to display a rather cheeky sense of humour about the now infamous fatwa and the burning of The Satanic Verses.

"I Commit to the Flames" (1934)

The dustjacket of one of the surprise publishing hits of 1934, theatre critic Ivor Brown's I Commit to the Flames (the title is a direct nod to the so-called Nazi "fire-incantations", the speeches made as books were hurled into bonfires). The book was first published in January, and had gone into a fourth impression by June.

Brown's occasionally funny book includes swipes at all manner of writers, from "Sex-Professors" to T.S. Eliot, from D.H. Lawrence to the music of someone called King Congo. It is all, it would seem, modernity's fault. And the solution? "For some kinds of rubbish the incinerator is the only remedy."

"Books like these are BURNED in the slave countries", New York Public Library, 1942

Brooklyn "Nazi-Banned Library" opened by Albert Einstein, December 1934 (from Jubilee Book of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, 1946)

The 'American Library of Nazi Banned Books' was a project of the reformist Brooklyn Jewish Center. It was inaugurated with fanfare before a crowd of 500 guests in December 1934, allowing the organisers plenty of time to prepare for an official opening planned for the second anniversary of the Nazi bookfires in May 1935. It was officially opened by Albert Einstein, who hoped that this American library might snatch some of the banned literary works from oblivion.The Library was openly modelled on the so-called "Library of the Burned Books" in Paris, which had been opened by German exiles in May 1934.

The text of Einstein's speech can be read online; see Einstein Archives Online, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem & the Einstein Papers Project, California Institute of Technology, Nr. 28-293.00.

British Museum & Paternoster Row, circa 1940

Two amazing photographs of the damage wrought in London by the Blitz. An almost contemporary report on the 'War on Books' commented:
“The general public, especially in London, still remembers vividly the big fire raids around St Paul’s when, in Paternoster Row and adjacent streets - the long-established centre of the book trade - more than six million volumes were destroyed. Millions of others have been lost in bookshops and libraries in provincial cities, and millions more in damaged, gutted, or burnt-out warehouses, printing and binding works. A total of twenty million volumes destroyed would probably be an underestimate.”

John Brophy, Britain Needs Books (London: National Book Council, November 1942)

Raymond Gram Swing's address to the ALA, May 1943

"Storm Center" with Bette Davis (1956)

Library of the Burned Books: plaque, Boulevard Arago, Montparnasse, Paris

The former "Library of the Burned Books" (also known as the Deutsche Freiheits Bibliothek), was established in Paris by German and anti-Nazi exiles, and opened on 10 May 1934 (exactly one year after the first major bookfires in Berlin and other German cities). After almost six years as a major research holding, and as a centre for the exiles, it was closed by French authorities during the phoney war. Although the exact fate of the library is not known, it can be assumed that it was destroyed, perhaps burnt, during the first months of the German occupation.
The Library was in a small studio on the Boulevard Arago in the XIII, not far from the Montparnasse cemetery. From the street there is nothing to commemorate the erstwhile Library (although there are plaques for several of the artists who lived in the precinct). However, in the small foyer, high up above the mailboxes, there is this plaque, with its rather sparse note.

David Low cartoon, 1938

Paper Salvage: from Life Magazine, 10 September 1945

Louvain: Bookplate from Louvain University Library, circa 1930

This bookplate was used in books that were given to the rebuilt Louvain University Library as a result of reparations enforced by the Treaty of Versailles. The Library had been destroyed during the German advance in late August 1914, and a contemporary report commissioned in Germany cleared their army of any wrongdoing (blaming, instead, irregular forces that were alleged to have deployed themselves in and around the library). In the West, the destroyed library became a potent propaganda symbol, and after the war restocking the destroyed library holdings an urgent task. Books and money were donated from around the world, but many more books were taken in the form of reparations from German collections. Hence this bookplate, which shows seated Wisdom rescuing a book from the flames (although a popular misconception thought that the bookplate actually depicted a German soldier setting the halls of the university alight).

Saint Dominic (from MNAC, Barcelona)

French cartoon, circa 1933

From the German-language edition of the Brown Book (1933)

Jonathan Rose

"Matthew Fishburn offers an original and often disturbing perspective on a dark chapter in literary history. He has a genius for drawing unexpected connections and he writes with the kind of elegance that was long ago banished from most academic books."
Professor Jonathan Rose, author of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and editor of The Holocaust and the Book.

The Book

The Nazi burning of the books in 1933 was one of the most infamous political spectacles of the twentieth century. In Berlin and all over Germany, Nazi officials and students organized elaborate parades and bonfires to mark their embrace of Hitler’s new government. Book burning has since become the symbol of any oppressive regime, and a modern taboo. As Heinrich Heine is often quoted: ‘Where one burns books, one will soon burn people’. This original and provocative new work examines the impact of these fires, concentrating on the years between the Nazi outrages and the publication of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, a period in which book burning took hold of the popular imagination. Much more than simply the study of a single shocking event, Burning Books explores how deeply embedded the myths of book burning have become in our cultural and literary history, and illustrates the enduring appeal of a great cleansing bonfire.