May 10, 1933:In numerous German university towns, the Nazis carted together thousands of books from public and private libraries and burned them in public squares. There are works by well-known authors such as Erich Kästner, Kurt Tucholsky, Carl von Ossietzky and Heinrich Mann, including many Jewish writers. Overall, books by more than 300 philosophers, scientists, poets, novelists and political authors are affected - a "Holocaust of Books", as the American magazine "Newsweek" wrote at the time.
Fire spells accompany the burns
In addition to ordinary citizens, students, but also rectors and professors of the universities, are involved in the book burnings on May 10th. People gather at Berlin's Opernplatz (today's Bebelplatz), at Wilhelmsplatz in Kiel, at the market square in Greifswald, at the Bismarck Column in Hanover and in other university towns. In Hamburg, the cremation did not take place until May 15 on Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer due to heavy rain. The actions, which are accompanied by so-called fire sayings, in which one caller in turn denigrates individual authors, continue into June.
Collections of banned books
The books were collected on wagons and then burned at the stake.On May 10, Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels himself was present in Berlin and declared the "age of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism" to be over. The studied Germanist Goebbels, who wrote his doctoral thesis under a Jewish professor, cleared the way for the destruction of hundreds of "un-German" literary works. In Berlin alone, far more than 20,000 books come together in the collection campaign for the book burning.
Erich Kästner, one of the authors concerned, also dares to go to the stake:"I stood in front of the university wedged between students in SA uniforms, saw our books fly into the flickering flames and heard the corny tirades of the small, cunning liar. Funeral weather hung over the City. (...) It was disgusting."
"Equalization" of literature
In their "Fire Spells", several callers named the respective authors whose works they threw into the flames.The book burnings are a first triumph for the policy of "conformity" and the suppression of free speech. At the same time, they are the climax of the campaign "Against the un-German spirit" with which the German student body, dominated by the Nazi student union, began in March 1933 to persecute Jewish and politically unpopular writers - many of these authors shape our image of the literature of the Weimar Republic today.
Heinrich Heine, whose writings were also banned by the National Socialists, put a gloomy prophecy in the mouth of his protagonist Hassan in the tragedy "Almansor" as early as 1820:"That was just a prelude. Where books are burned, people are also burned in the end ." These words were to come true in Germany a few years after 1933.