The most unusual monument I have ever seen is the Book-Burning Memorial, called “Empty Bookshelves.” It is located in the Bebelplatz (formerly Opernplatz), a public square on the south side of the Unter den Linden boulevard in the center of Berlin, Germany. A glass plate, set into the cobblestones of the square, allows passers-by to peer into a sunken library. There are enough shelves in this underground library to hold 20,000 books, but the shelves are empty. https://www.visitberlin.de/en/book-burning-memorial-bebelplatz/.
“Empty Bookshelves” is the work of Micha Ullman and serves as a reminder that on 10 May 1933 twenty thousand so-called “un-German” books went up in flames in this spot under the direction of the Nazis. The inscription quotes 19th century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine’s words from his 1820 play “Almansor”: “Das war ein Vorspiel nur; dort wo man Buecher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” (That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people.)
“Empty Bookshelves” Book-Burning Memorial in the Bebelplatz in Berlin’s city center. Photo © J. Elke Ertle, 2017. www.walled-in-berlin.com
How did the Berlin book-burning come about?
After World War I, many university students opposed the Weimar Republic http://www.walled-in-berlin.com/j-elke-ertle/weimar-republic-can-democracy-be-too-democratic/ and found in National Socialism a way to express their political and social discontent. On 10 May 1933, the Nazi German Student Association and their professors hosted a book-burning in a nationwide “Action against the Un-German Spirit.” Students in as many as 34 other German university towns initiated book-burning ceremonies or marched in torchlight parades. They burnt the works of hundreds of independent authors, journalists, philosophers and academics. The books to be burnt were chosen according to blacklists and focused primarily on books written by Jewish, religious, anarchist, communist or pacifist authors, who were viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. With the words, “No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser, Erich Kaestner…” Germany’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, tossed the first books into the fire. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005852. Other blacklisted authors included Berthold Brecht, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Helen Keller, Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy and Kurt Tucholsky.
Other book-burnings
The 10 May 1933 book-burning under the Nazi regime is perhaps the most infamous one in history, but it was by no means the only book-burning during that time period. Years later, after having defeated Germany in 1945, the Allied occupation authorities in Germany drew up a list of over 30,000 titles. As part of the denazification program, they had millions of books confiscated and destroyed the following year. The books burnt ranged from simple school textbooks to poetry.
In the United States, German-Americans came under severe scrutiny when the US entered World War I in 1917. The American Defense Society urged Americans to burn German books and literature, and for a time, book-burning ceremonies became the rage in the United States. http://www.walled-in-berlin.com/j-elke-ertle/where-have-german-americans-gone/
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Walled-In is my story of growing up in Berlin during the Cold War. Juxtaposing the events that engulfed Berlin during the Berlin Blockade, the Berlin Airlift, the Berlin Wall and Kennedy’s Berlin visit with the struggle against my equally insurmountable parental walls, Walled-In is about freedom vs. conformity, conflict vs. harmony, domination vs. submission, loyalty vs. betrayal.
