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The Action against the Un-German Spirit

The nighttime events came as the climax of what had been called the Aktion wider den undeutschen Geist, or “Action against the Un-German Spirit,” which had gone on for several weeks leading up to the fires. The collective excess of burning was also accompanied by various other concrete measures. Libraries halted lending of works by authors who were in disfavor, and universities set up special collection points for books and urged students to “cleanse” their personal collections. There were various blacklists in circulation that formed the basis for this.

The campaign was not, as long assumed, sparked “from the top,” meaning by Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, although he did deliver the opening remarks at the central event, on Berlin’s Opernplatz. Instead, the whole thing was mainly planned by young students under the leadership of the German Student Union, which had been dominated by National Socialists since 1931.

It is one of the more disconcerting aspects of Nazi history that young students, of all people, were among the movement’s most fervent and earliest supporters. Erich Kästner voiced sharp criticism afterward: “In today’s auto-da-fé [...], Germany’s students executed their own claims to any freedom of expression in the future. The murder they committed this evening was also suicide in advance.”

The book burning in Munich

The events of that evening in May 1933 also unfolded in Munich, as elsewhere. Many students from both of the city’s large universities marched through the streets carrying torches, accompanied by tens of thousands of onlookers, and finally gathered at Königsplatz. The march was preceded by an announcement in the atrium at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), where the rectors presented the new rules on student rights to the student body. Among other things, Jewish students were now excluded from bodies representing the students. The ceremony took place where, just a few years later, members of the White Rose were caught passing out leaflets by a caretaker – right where today’s graduates have their photos taken with their diplomas.

One-sided remembrance?

Walking on Munich’s Königsplatz some evening these days, when all is quiet, it doesn’t take much historical imagination to conjure up images of these events in the mind’s eye, in part because much of the architecture remains the same. These are images of events that were deliberately staged by the Nazis in keeping with every rule of propaganda, to send a signal of the suppression of artistic and cultural freedom to the wider world. Our recollections are shaped, among other things, by the black-and-white photographs taken by Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. These photos continued to shape our image of history even after the rupture of 1945, as TV programs, school textbooks, and signs in museums imprinted them into the memories of many Germans. Thus there is a dominant retrospective view in which the book burnings acted first and foremost as harbingers of the Holocaust, as Heinrich Heine described in his tragedy Almansor: “Anywhere people burn books, they end up burning other people.”

Strangely, though, these notions leave out the most important part: the books themselves. What kinds of books were fed to the fire? Who wrote them? What were they about?

Survivors of barbarism

Annette Kelm’s photo series Verbrannte Bücher (Burned Books) is now on display right near the scene of the historical events, in the entryway of the Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, where it serves in part to urge viewers to reconsider their own habits of remembrance. Unlike in the related part of the permanent exhibition, the focus of the viewer’s interest here is not on the brutal actions taken by the Nazis, but rather the printed matter itself in all its simplicity and beauty, honored as survivors of barbarism.

White frames present 24 photos of first editions of some of the books burned at the time. Unlike the black-and-white propaganda photos taken that night, the books’ colorful original covers are likely familiar to very few visitors. The images cast a slight shadow, taking on a three-dimensional appearance. Each one is enlarged from the original, but they are all at the same scale. The frontal perspective draws the viewer in. The archival pigment printing method used by Kelm is among the most resilient production techniques in existence – these works are printed for the ages, you might say, in sharp contrast to the Nazis’ own destructive aims.

The Nazis’ favorite target

Kalm’s selection represents the full breadth and diversity of the works, genres, subjects, and authors singled out for destruction. The fires devoured works of nonfiction, journalism and drama alongside poetry and novels. Many of the books were by well-known writers like Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970). The latter’s book All Quiet on the Western Front, which was published in 1929 and went on to become the most successful book of the 20th century, was the subject of arguably the most heated cultural and political debate in Weimar Germany. The controversy boosted sales, but it also made Remarque a favorite target of the National Socialists. When the film adaptation of the bestseller hit theaters, in 1930, the brown shirts tried out cultural boycott strategies for the first time, with some success. Shortly before the Nazis seized power, on January 29, 1933, Remarque fled into exile in Switzerland, sensing what was to come.

But the books burned were by more than just obvious opponents of the Nazi regime. They also included numerous works by authors who have remained largely unknown to this day specifically because of the persecution they faced at the hands of the Nazis. They include Maria Leitner (1892–1941), whose 1932 social commentary Eine Frau reist durch die Welt (A Woman Travels the World) is one of Kelm’s subjects. Born in Hungary, Leitner always wrote in German. She has been called “a very early female Wallraff” (Volker Weidermann). Her profession and emancipated lifestyle were the polar opposite of the Nazi ideal of femininity. She was rounded up with a group of other exiles by the French authorities and sent to the Gurs camp in the Pyrenees in 1940. Leitner escaped, but her trail abruptly stops in Marseille in the spring of 1941. She is presumed to have starved to death there, utterly impoverished.

Kelm’s photo series is an invitation to examine, or reexamine, forgotten authors and books, but it is also more. It can also be viewed as a monument to cultural diversity, and thus as an attempt to reverse the book burners’ victory after the fact, turning it into a defeat.

By Dr. Paul-Moritz Rabe, Research Associate, Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism