140,000 Watch Students Fire Volumes in a Drizzle, but Show Little Enthusiasm.
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SOME ‘FETES’ POSTPONED
But ‘Un-German’ Literature Is Consigned to the Flames in Most University Towns.
By FREDERICK T. BIRCHALL. Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
BERLIN, May 10.—In most of the German university towns tonight the enthusiastic studenthoods are ceremoniously burning ‘the un- German spirit’ as exemplified in literature, pamphlet, correspon- dence and record. It is all being! done to the accompaniment of torchlight parades, martial music and much patriotic speechifying— the British Guy Fawkes Day in- tensified a thousandfold.
There are some thirty universi- ties in Germany, at least one to each State. Each was to have had its bonfire, but the celebrations in Cologne, Heidelberg and other places were postponed until next week.
The celebrations held varied some- what, but more in degree than in kind. Berlin naturally had the largest and what happened here was more or less typical of the celebrations elsewhere.
Probably 40,000 persons assembled in the great square between the opera house and the university and stood in a drizzle to watch the show. Perhaps as many more gathered along the five miles of streets through which the torch- bearing parade of students escorted the borrowed trucks and private cars containing the books and pamphlets to be burned. But to the uninspired observer it savored strongly of the childish.
5,000 Students in Parade.
Five thousand students, young men and young women together, marched in the parade. All the stu- dent corps were represented—red caps and green caps, purple and blue, with a chosen band of officers of the dueling corps in plush tam o' shanters, white breeches, blue tunics and high boots—with spurs. Bearing banners and singing Nazi songs and college melodies, they arrived.
It was toward midnight when they reached the great square.
BERLIN LUKEWARM TO BOOK-BURNING
There on a granite block of pave- ment protected by a thick covering of sand had been built up a funeral pyre of crossed logs. some twelve feet square and five feet high.
Finally the head of the procession arrived. It passed the piled logs and formed within the great space reserved for it.
As they passed, the paraders tossed upon the logs the stumps of lighted torches that they had car- ried, until from end to end the mass was aflame.
Then came the books and pam- phlets. The cars carrying them stopped at a distance and each group of students brought an arm- ful and tossed it into the fire. A draft caught up the embers, bearing them far and wide. First. the crowds cheered each new con- | tribution. but they soon tired.
Then the students’ president, Gutjahr, in a Nazi uniform, made a speech. He and his fellows had gathered, he said, to consign to the flames ‘‘un-German’’ books and documents that threatened to dis- integrate the national movement. They took joy in it. Henceforth there must be purity in German literature.
Crowd Seems Disappointed.
It was a boy’s speech and it was received with boyish enthusiasm— by the students. The crowd seemed disappointed. To work up enthu- sizsm when fresh consignments reached the fire a student barker began to name the authors:
“Sigmund Freud—for falsifying our history and degrading its great figures!”
The crowd cheered.
“Emil Ludwig—burned for liter- ary rascality and high treason against Germany!’
Loud cheers!
Then Erich Maria Remarque— “for degrading the German lan- guage and the highest patriotic ideal’’; Alfred Kerr, late dramatic critic of the Tageblatt, denounced as ‘‘a dishonest literary editor of the Tageblatt, pilloried as, "anti-German," and Georg Bern- hard, former editor of the Vossi- sche Zeitung. For these last there were available for burning only a few copies of their respective news- papers and a few magazine articles.
So it went until there appeared, amid Nazi salutes and protected by uniformed satellites, the attraction of the evening, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propa- ganda, himself. Mounted on a tiny swastika-draped rostrum, he spoke.
“Jewish intellectualism is dead,’ he declared. "National socialism has hewn the way. The German folk soul can again express itself.
“These flames do not only illu- minate the final end of the old era, they light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the débris of the past. If the old men do not understand what is going on, let them grasp that we young [Dr. Goebbels is under 40] men have gone and done it.
“The old goes up in flames, the new shall be fashioned from the flame in our hearts.”
Much more, but all like that. Then the song “‘The Nation to Arms’? and the Horst Wessel song. More literature on the fire. And more student singing. But the crowd disintegrating until it be- came a dreary duty to burn what literature was left.
It was not so large in quantity, because today a paper mill offered a small price for all it could get and the offer was accepted on con- dition that the student representa- tives should supervise the actual destruction. The proceeds will pay for the torches and the bands.
Original List Reduced.
As to what went into the cere- monial bonfires tonight and will be included in the reconversion. into raw material by the paper mills at the rate of one mark for 100 kilo- grams [currently about 27.5 cents 220 pounds], the destruction is not so all-embracing as what was at first threatened.
There is good reason to believe that the ripples of amusement that went through the outside world over the first rush of student en- thusiasm had some effect on the older and wiser university heads. German propaganda authorities themselves, who recently had seen the effect of making Germany ri- diculous as well as censurable, may even have been heard from. At any rate, not everything under attack went into the discard.
For several days whole truckloads of books, both seized and volunta- rily offered for immolation, have at the students’ house in the Oranienburgerstrasse, but these have undergone a weed- ing-out process. Students have been busy night and day going through the piles to insure that especially valuable books or others not on the German index expurgatorius should escape. Such of these as were found are to be returned to the libraries.
Nevertheless, plenty has been left that elsewhere in the world would be deemed innocuous if not posl- tivly beneficial, or at worst capa- ble of carrying its own condemna- tion. In the pink-faced, healthy student-hood between the ages of 18 and 22 is found boundless en- thusiasm, but not overmuch discre- tion. In this instance the enthu- siasm had virtually free rein.
How Books Were Chosen.
About such pictures and pamph- lets as were gathered in from Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s so-called In- stitute of Sexual Science the other day—which, with all the correspon- dence from outsiders who had taken the place seriously, went into the flames tonight—there could be little question. But there was much more. Take this for- mula, laid down in one of the stu- dents’ appeals for sacrificial ma- terial and note its comprehensive- ness:
“Anything that works subversive- ly on family life, married life or love or the ethics of our youth or our future or strikes at the roots of German thought, home and the driving forces in our any works of those who would subordinate the soul to the material, anything that serves the purpose of lies.”
Almost anything could be under- stodd by this student enthusiast to be covered by that, And so with ‘the seeping poison that hides un- der the mask of pacifism.” to say nothing of the ban on all literature emanating from Jewish thinkers, all of which—although the works of Heine are strangely encugh not among the sacrificed—are included in this comprehensive student ana- thema.
“The Jew, who is powerful in in- tellect, but weal: in blood and with- out home and fireside, remains without understanding in the pres- ence of German thought, fails to dignify it and, therefore, is bound to injure the German spirit.”
Nobel Prize Winners Included.
Inevitably the bonfire piles be-, came large. World distinction and world praise had not counted in assembling them. Nobel Prize win- ners and all went into the auto da fé.
There was, for example, one of the first pacifist novels ever writ- ten. Bertha von Suttner got the Nobel Prize for ‘Lay Down Your Arms’ in 1905, but it has now be- “un-German’’ and was burned.
The works of Thomas Mann, a later Nobel Prize winner, went into the flames en bloc What savad Sinclair Lewis may never be re- | vealed, but many other 3,000,000- volume sellers became sacrifices, beginning with Erich Maria Re- margue’s ‘‘All Quiet on the West- ern Front.”
The victims even included Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the Japanese- Viennese author, who dreams of Pan-Europa. He falls under the ban because it is not a Prussian Pan-Europa and, moreover, might’ be Suspected of having a Socialist. tint.
For Berlin the first list alone— supplemented later—comprised four long typewritten pages containing the names of 160 authors, many of them almost unheard of before. It almost seemed as if any German student browsing in a second-hand bookstore, encountering a volume’ that he privately regarded as spicy, had been privileged to name a can- didate.
The American Victims.
Among the Americans, Helen Keller's “How I Became a Social- ‘ist’’ got into the fire. She had for company Upton Sinclair, Judge Ben Lindsey, Jack London and Morris Hillquit, among others. Judge | Lindsey got there because he is rfe-' garded as assailing the marriage system. Robert Carr was burned in the shape of his “Wild-Blooming Youth,” which might have been expected to be unknown to fame in. Berlin but evidently isn't.
Socialist and Communist authors naturally figured largely. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lassalle, Bebel, Liebknecht, Kautsky, Bern- stein and Wilferding among the Germans and Austrians, Lenin, Stalin, Zinovieff, Lunacharsky and Bukharin among the Russians, and Henry Lichtenberger, French phil- osopher who wrote on Franco-Ger- man relations, all went up in smoke as "un-Germean."
In the domain of belles lettres Heinrich Mann is included with Thomas Mann and then comes a long list including Emil Ludwig, who writes about Germany for The New York Times; Lion Feucht- iwanger, Arthur Schnitzler, Jakob Wassermann, Arnold and Stephan Zweig, Walther Rathenau, the Ger- man Foreign Minister who was as- sassinated by Nationalist gangster; Hugo Preuss, who wrote the Weimar Constitution for the repub- lic and spent the rest of his time expounding it, and countless others.
The bonfires are still burning as this is being written and there is going up in their smoke more than college boy prejudice and enthusi- asm. A lot of the old German liberalism—if any was left—was burned tonight.
The New York Times
Published: May 11, 1933
2022
They're Burning Books in Tennessee
Greg Locke's zealots set fire to sacred millennial texts like Harry Potter and Twilight Alejandro Ramirez
Last week, McMinn County made news when the school board voted to ban beloved graphic novel Maus — a Holocaust story told with anthropomorphic mice and cats — due to instances of swear words and nudity. While the vote happened in early January, it went viral following a report from TN Holler.
Last night, Mt. Juliet pastor and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Greg Locke decided to turn it up a notch by organizing an old-fashioned book burning. The books included millennial staples like Harry Potter and Twilight — hits of the early Aughts that were targeted by Christian book burnings back in the day.
In a sermon preceding the bonfire, Locke described beefing with "Free Mason devils" and said "I ain't gonna be 'suiciding myself' no time soon." Locke also said people aren't mad that they were burning books, but mad because of the books they were burning — implying that his critics, even other pastors, were devil and witchcraft supporters.
You can see the footage in Locke's Facebook video of the event — the burning starts about an hour in.
Tennessee ended January on a couple fucked-up and embarrassing notes, thanks to the aforementioned book-ban news in McMinn County as well a shocking incident wherein law enforcement officers gunned down a man on the highway. Locke's fiery assault on youth literature might just keep that godawful streak going into February.
Tyler Salinas took photos of the event, and said there was one counterprotester in attendance. The man threw a book into the fire and claimed it was the Bible while holding up copies of Fahrenheit 451 a nd On the Origin of Species. Check out Salinas' photos below:
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