The images of the book burning organised by the National Socialist German Student Union over 90 years ago on what was then Berlin’s Opernplatz, now Bebelplatz, are etched into the global collective memory. As an ‘action against the un-German spirit’, the book burning marked the beginning of a ‘cleansing mania’ that would lead to the Nuremberg Race Laws and the pogroms of 9 November 1938, ultimately culminating in the Shoah. When attempting to understand this event, and leaving aside whether Heine’s famous quotation, ‘Where books are burned, people will also be burned in the end’ can be read and understood as a gloomy self-fulfilling prophecy or as a sad conclusion, the burning of books and the crimes that inevitably arose from that same logic do indeed touch upon our present moment, even if the event has thus far failed to have a significant community-building resonance outside of the academic discourse. And it is not just about Germany and its coming to terms with this history. The aim should be to understand this grappling with the past as an ongoing communal process. One that endeavours to embed the commemoration of such events in a global context to show that they are always also crimes against humanity as such. After all, the Nazis were successful – if not in all cases – in their efforts to erase literature that was by their standards ‘worthy of burning’ from the collective memory to the extent that the works of Gina Kaus, Kurt Münzer, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Maria Leitner, and Werner Türk are still awaiting rediscovery.
If the theory of global collective memory as a memory that learns from the mistakes of the past were to take hold, not only would 10 May 1933 find a place within it as a negative example of a national superiority complex taken to the extreme, but Heine’s quote would also acquire the status of an international law. For there have been more than 45 book burnings worldwide since 1933, and I am afraid to say that where books have been burnt (e.g. Cambodia, China, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Ukraine), the Nazi book burnings served as a model, rather than as an historical warning. Indeed, the killing of people usually followed.
