(vii) Preface

"As a result, while this study depends on a much broader literary history of book burning and censorship, it concentrates, not coincidentally, on the period which began with the Nazi fires in 1933 and ended with the publication of Fahrenheit 451 (1953). It was in this 20-year period that the iconic role of book burning in the popular imagination took hold, and an orthodox position on book burning was forged."(xv)

"Indeed, this work seeks to show how during this period the imagery of book burning was appropriated by everyone from staunch Communists to fellow-travellers, from dystopian novelists to bored literary critics, many of whom toyed with the notion that a great purging fire might still be something that refreshes society."(xv)

(1) Introduction

Het hoofdstuk start met het verhaal over de verbranding van de boeken van de bibliotheek van Alexandria.

"The most popular of all parables of book burning is the story of the burning of the library at Alexandria by the Caliph Omar in 642 AD. The basic story is familiar: after the fall of the city, the Caliph was approached by an unfrocked priest called John the Grammarian, who requested the unwanted books of the library. Omar is alleged to have replied: 'Touching the books you mention, if what is written in them agrees with the book of God, they are not required; if it disagrees, they are not desired. Destroy them therefore.'"(1)

Maar Fishburn wijst er op dat lang niet iedereen negatief stond tegenover die gebeurtenissen in Alexandria. Seneca, Pope, Burckhardt, Rousseau vonden het prima. Het is duidelijk dat dit afhangt van of je historisch ingesteld bent:

"Thiem usefully characterized this as the tension between the historian and the 'philosophe', between the desire to salvage or horde the past, and the forlorn hope of being freed from its weight." [mijn nadruk] (2)

"As the stories told about the library of Alexandria show, book burnings are often overloaded into cliché or twisted into myth, and while the destruction of unorthodox or heretical writings has long been an almost routine part of government, only a few well-known acts are commonly remembered. The first recorded state-sponsored book burning is the destruction ordered by Grand Councillor Li Ssu in Ch’in China in 213 BC." [mijn nadruk] (2)

Maar niet zonder nuances. Werken van praktisch nut en wetenschappelijke werken werden niet vernietigd. En zelfs de verbannen boeken werden nog in archief gehouden. Verder valt op dat vernietiging van boeken meestal mislukt: een aantal exemplaren overleeft het en later worden die simpelweg weer opnieuw gedrukt. Desondanks is de vernietiging van onwelgevallige boeken van alle tijden. De Kerk was er ook bijzonder intensief mee bezig. Met name toen de boekdrukkunst uitgevonden was. Bijvoorbeeld met de Index van Verboden Boeken van 1544.

"Religious censorship had dire consequences for the Jewish populations of Europe. Twenty-four cartloads of Jewish writings were burned in Paris in 1242, ten martyrs were incinerated with their books in 1288 in Troyes, and more books were burned in England in 1299. In the 1240s the Talmud was regularly burned as it ‘threatened’ and ‘insulted’ Catholicism, and expurgations of the text were ordered in Spain in the 1260s. The real mechanism for censorship began with the papal bulls regarding the mass conversion of the Jews, most famously the early fifteenth-century Etsi doctoris of Benedict XIII. Once again the main target of these attacks was the Talmud, culminating in its burning by the Inquisition in 1554 and, three years later, the prohibition against Jews from owning anything in Hebrew except the Bible." [mijn nadruk] (4)

Maar het waren niet alleen de gevestigde autoriteiten die boeken verbrandden, opstandelingen en revolutionairen konden er ook wat van.

"French censorship could be said to culminate in the annihilation of in excess of 4 million books, including 25,000 manuscripts, in the suppression of the monasteries after the French Revolution."(6)

"Simply put, book burning is as old as books, and yet, books are improbably difficult to burn. The audience might be dispersed, the author persecuted or silenced, but the books themselves have a habit of surviving. Walter J. Ong, in his history of the technology of writing, commented that after 'absolutely total and devastating refutation, it says exactly the same thing as before'." [mijn nadruk] (8)

"With the Enlightenment, book burning became unfashionable, and the last book condemned to the public fire in England was The Present Crisis of 1775. Yet, as the rest of this work is devoted to exploring, the end of book burning was greatly exaggerated."(8)

(9) 1 - The fear of books

"Book burning, the tone of such critics optimistically implied, could never be successful, and the notion that publicly burning a book only advertised it became a literary commonplace. And yet, the proscription of book burning had been more apparent than real: debates about its efficacy continued, and zealots, anarchists, utopians and social reformers continued to cluster around hoping that one last fire might do the trick. Without this background the tenor and the effect of the student fires of Germany in 1933 cannot be clearly understood."(10)

Utopisch denken gaat vaak samen met het beeld van een nieuwe schone start maken en dat weer leidt tot voorstellen om alles uit het verleden te vernietigen, boeken, archieven, wat ook.

"Such fires define a programme, and publicly affirm it. This is the classic utopian moment, not only a break with the past but an interdiction against even remembering it, a development which shows why the rhetoric of the cleansing fire – why book burning – is never far away from the borders of utopia.
Indeed, it is a truism to say that one of the main conceits of the utopian tradition is purity, which is why its ideal location has always been a protected hamlet, an inaccessible citadel, or, best of all, an island: whether it is the metal walls of Plato’s Atlantis or the vast channel dug by King Utopus to separate his newly formed kingdom from the mainland. Utopia relies on a radical separation from the stale political realities of the old world, which is why, from the seventeenth century on, the vast emptiness of the imagined Terra Australis was such a popular destination. Order, purity and symmetry are the dominant notes of the genre. In the Dominican friar Campanella’s City of the Sun (written 1602, published 1623) the city is protected by a series of seven walls and takes as its founding philosophy ‘first it is necessary to eradicate and cleanse and then to build and plant’, while the principal city of Mezzorania in Berington’s Gaudentio di Lucca (1737) has been cut off from the outside world for over 3,000 years. Nor is it coincidental that so many protagonists in this genre end up running – or being chased – from their various realms of rational calm. The utopian societies are often so dull as to be uninhabitable: such is the malaise of the protagonist Sadeur in Gabriel Foigny’s La Terre Australe, who, after a decade or two of sexless bliss, rational debate, calisthenics and gardening, cannot wait to make off into the wild. Fiction, it is apparent, is not particularly amenable to rational calm. " [mijn nadruk] (11)

"In Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing New World (1666) the universal language is fundamental to their political stability, while Thomas Northmore’s Memoirs of Planetes (1795) recommended ‘the establishment of a universal language’. And, if language can be perfected, books might be expected to follow suit. In some cases this is little more than a continuation of the rigorous censorship of obscenity. In James Burgh’s Cesares (1764), a South American utopia which relied on religious conformity, surveillance and censorship, ‘all immoral and obscene books, prints, pictures &c; are ordered to be burnt; and those that have them, to be fined, as encouragers of vice’."(12)

Er volgen nog meer voorbeelden van het verbranden van boeken en ander spul in de hoop op een nieuwe start.

"Books have been treated badly with such regularity that in the 1930s the bibliophile Holbrook Jackson published two significant studies on the subject, The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930) and The Fear of Books (1932). Taken together, the two works provide a startling catalogue of every emotion from outrage to indifference."(16)

Veel intellectuelen (Freud, Wittgenstein etc.) verbranden hun eigen notities en werk dat ze niet meer zien zitten. Zelfcensuur alom. Of ze verbranden brieven.

"Conversely, the desire to salvage as much as possible is routine for the keepers of literary archives, who often seem to be in open conflict with the authors they revere. It is a commonplace for the introductions to collections of letters to discuss, even tentatively quantify, the letters which remain lost, either through deliberate or accidental destruction. In the archive every letter is imagined as something that has narrowly escaped burning, and the more narrow the escape the more exciting the material."(18)

Veel materiaal wordt verbrand vanuit patriottisme, zoals wanneer er een oorlog is.

"Significantly, however, these quotidian fires have been eclipsed by one of the most famous library fires; indeed, one of the most famous cultural losses of the twentieth century: the burning of the library at Louvain University in the first weeks of the war. Louvain had been overrun by the German advance on 26 August 1914, and much of the town was destroyed in a fire which the Germans were reputed to have deliberately lit; or, at least, to have made little attempt to contain ..."(20)

Over de censuur in de jaren tussen de twee wereldoorlogen waarbij religie op de achtergrond én op de voorgrond aanwezig is. Voorbeeld o.a. Joyce's Ulysses.

"In the United States, Joyce’s novel was prosecuted under the steadfast gaze of Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice."(25)

Die censuur leidde evengoed tot allerlei boekverbrandingen. Fishburn geeft vele voorbeelden.

[De waarden en normen op de achtergrond zijn die van de mensen die de macht hebben en mensen willen 'beschermen' tegen 'verkeerde taal en verkeerde gedachten'. Die mensen zien nooit de betrekkelijkheid van hun waarden en normen in, ze twijfelen er nooit aan dat ze gelijk hebben. Het gaat vrijwel altijd om opvattingen over seksualiteit en over politieke opvattingen die in strijd zijn met de status quo.]

"Which is why the book collector Holbrook Jackson’s witty and personal The Fear of Books is a useful primer to understanding the attraction of book burning. Jackson’s book collates hundreds of examples of the destruction of books, including the bonfires of social disorder, but is more concerned with the individual and atavistic desire to throw a book into the fire – book burning as a private act."(29-30)

[Even één voorbeeld:]

"Ominously, the same year as Jackson’s work was published, the value of a concentrated attack on a cultural centre was not lost on the planners for the Japanese air force, which raided Shanghai on 18 January 1932. Carefully avoiding the international sectors, their attack encompassed the locality of the distinctive Oriental Library, with its holdings of 700 periodicals and 600,000 volumes, including first editions from the Sung dynasty, and the Commercial Press, ‘the sole source of schoolbooks for a very large part of China and the location of a library of Chinese books, ancient and modern’. Along with most other buildings in the sector, both were burned to the ground. "(30)

[Ik vind zoiets schokkend. Wat een verlies aan cultuur.]

(31) 2 - The Burning of the Books

De bekendste boekverbranding is die van 10 mei 1933 in Berlijn door de nazi's, gevolgd door soortgelijke in de rest van Duitsland..

"These fires have since become synonymous with the barbarity of the Nazi regime, but such an understanding was by no means automatic, and the international response to the events tended to be perplexed, even bemused. Through studying the tone of many of these reports, this chapter assays the initial reactions to the German bookfires, and returns them to their historical context. "(31)

"The crucial point is that far from being a spontaneous outburst, the fires were the result of meticulous planning, and imagined as part of an obsessive attempt to purify the German language. This was made explicit in their socalled ‘twelve theses’, which was printed on posters and pasted up on notice boards."(32)

"The literature of the cities, of the Communist agitators, of the Jewish-Bolsheviks was to be staunchly resisted in favour of true German Volk literature: no more nihilism, internationalism or Asphaltliteratur would be tolerated. Such vague, effectively meaningless, rhetoric would be much-used by the apologists for the fires"(32)

De buitenlandse reacties in de media waren wisselend van toon. De boekverbrandingen werden zelfden als een aanval op de rede besschreven. Ze werden beschreven als kinderachtig, zinloos, symboliek, ze werden eigenlijk niet serieus genomen.

"The bookfires did generate some anxious enquiries from international associations of writers, wary of what was being planned.(...) Yet such concerns were just as often trivialized."(38)

[Dat klinkt naar eigenbelang.]

"The strongest and most unmediated denunciation of the event was a prescient open letter to the German students from Helen Keller, whose How I Became a Socialist was a rather obvious inclusion on the Nazi Index. (...) As Keller’s letter implies, although the book burnings were often the catalyst for international comment, contemporary reports made clear that the protest rallies in the United States in 1933 were more concerned with racial persecution than intellectual censorship."(40)

[Fishburn laat in het vervolg zien dat dat klopt. Zo van: het is niet erg als mensen dom en onwetend gehouden worden, zo lang ze maar niet racistisch en antisemitisch zijn. En zo haalt iedereen weer zijn eigen stokpaardje van stal. Allebei is erg, spreekt dat niet vanzelf? En het een kent een sterke samenhang met het ander, ook dat.]

"What the protests did grasp was that while the burnings may have been childish, they were also a succinct and ominous demonstration of the importance the Nazi government was according to ‘race deterioration’ versus ‘purity’. In this sense, one of the most important events on the Berlin schedule was the destruction of the Hirschfeld Institute of Sexual Science. The Institute, which had been established by the pre-eminent sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin in 1919, incorporated a vast archive of material including detailed personal case studies of many patients.(...) Rather than the merely symbolic, here was evidence of the destruction of a genuine archive and the attempted eradication of an entire mode of thought." [mijn nadruk] (41-42)

"Here was a point where Nazi ideas deliberately took advantage of conservative or bourgeois morality, in particular the anxiety about the laxity of Weimar Berlin."(42)

"As this suggests, there was often a relative acceptance – if not a distinct longing – for the cleaning-up of Weimar. "(43)

[Waaraan je inderdaad kunt zien dat de Nazi's aansloten bij het al langer bestaande conservatieve denken van de bourgeoisie en dat veel van die conservatieven niet zo veel bezwaar hadden tegen bepaalde zaken die de Nazi's uithaalden zoals die boekverbrandingen.]

De reacties van H.G. Wells en Joseph Roth.

"The last point to be made is that although each had a different agenda, Brittain, Wells and Roth all implicitly showed the necessity to explain the relevance of the bookfires. Roth tried to understand the book burnings not as mere theatre or a cheap mob spectacle, but as evidence of the resurgence of the machinery of political intolerance. Each attempted, moreover, to smash any indifference to the significance of book burning by singling it out as an inherently threatening symbol. In this sense they wrote against the current of popular opinion."(47)

(49) 3 - The Library of the Burned Books

"It was in this atmosphere that a small group of German- speaking anti-fascists met in Paris in February 1934 to begin planning one of the most unlikely ventures of the decade, the Deutsche Freiheitsbibliothek, which became better known in English as the ‘Library of the Burned Books’. "(49)

Over de Reichtagsbrand. Over The Brown Book van gevluchte schrijvers etc. die zich in Parijs gevestigd hadden en die Hitler en het nationaalsocialisme bestreden.

"The Brown Book was the central document of protest and exile, so the inclusion of a chapter on ‘The Campaign Against Culture’ was an important development in contemporary responses to the book burning."(53)

"Such an emphatic statement hints at the exiles’ increasing frustration that the fires were still being seen as futile pyrotechnics rather than representing the repression of education, literature and art, not least, as the Brown Book showed, because the absence of any official protest from German universities meant that they appeared, in practice, to have endorsed the fires."(54)

" ... in December 1933 the group officially decided to create an anti-fascist archive and library, the Library of the Burned Books. Koestler was involved, but it was his old friend and Berlin roommate Alfred Kantorowicz who was named as its head."(54)

"There were initially great hopes for the Library of the Burned Books to have a broader meaningful role, but they did not come to fruition, as international attention evaporated."(63)

"The library became not only a meeting place but a research centre for an almost unimaginable number of articles and full-length books. A consistent pattern developed: the staffers at the library would help prepare a series of reports on one aspect of National Socialism which would be, in turn, published at an émigré press such as Carrefour in Paris or Querido in Amsterdam. As the book came off the press there would be advertisements and editorials in the Pariser Tageblatt and, to complete the circle, the library would mount a special exhibit to complement the book and promote its theme."(68)

"The Spanish Civil War, of course, changed everything, not least because so many of the Paris exiles disappeared into the ranks of the international brigade."(70)

"At some stage during the drôle de guerre French authorities closed the Library and, after the occupation of Paris in June, ceded it to the German occupation forces. In the second month of German occupation the first list of proscribed books was issued (the ‘Liste Bernhard’) and at the end of August an estimated 700,000 books were confiscated from French libraries. It had always been planned that the library would be transported back to Germany once Hitler was defeated, but now the German army caught up with it. Although no record remains of the final moments of the Library of the Burned Books, its destruction was assured."(72)

(73) 4 - To Hell with Culture

"Most agreed on the vulgarity of the National Socialist pageants, but for every international report which dwelt on their childish barbarity, there were several others that understood how such an act could signify a refreshed commitment to art or politics. (...) By exploring the fiction and political rhetoric of the 1930s, this chapter shows that the distaste for book burning did not banish the nostalgia for a good bonfire."(73)

Vele voorbeelden van schrijvers en critici die speelden met het idee van het verbranden van boeken.

"Even the outbreak of the war didn’t dent the enthusiasm of many critics, who still commended the bonfire as a useful sign of human and artistic renewal."(79)

[En altijd was dat gebaseerd op positieve of negatieve waarderingen van boeken, dus op waarden en normen. Boeken verbranden is een normatieve daad: je hebt er een doel mee, je wil er iets mee bereiken dat je belangrijk vindt, je wil er een denken en voelen mee uitschakelen dat je onwenselijk vindt en dat je uit de wereld wil helpen. Het kaf van het koren willen scheiden is een normatieve daad.]

"If the critics were ambiguous on the question of book burning, so too were the scholars, as they contextualized one of modernity’s fads within a much longer debate about censorship, education and reform."(80)

"Internationally there was a marked reluctance to be too hasty in judging the Nazi reforms, and many critics called for patience in understanding the new ‘German literature’."(82)

"Similarly, German librarians defended the fires with the neat argument that they were both necessary and wildly exaggerated. In Chicago a fractious crowd listened to Dr Frederich Schonemann of the University of Berlin insist that the fires had been lit to combat a ‘tremendous flood of books on nudism and of a generally pornographic nature unfit for either juvenile or adult reading’ which had inundated Germany. ‘I am sorry to say’, continued Schonemann, ‘that the authors of many – of a majority – were Jewish.’"(83-84)

[Als voorbeeld van dat normatieve en dat dat vaakt raakt aan negatieve opvattingen over seksualiteit. ]

"It was in this period that the lines of the propaganda war which would dominate the rest of the decade were firmly drawn, a debate which relied heavily on the emotive symbolism of fire. The National Socialists had adopted fire as their fundamental motif, depicting their pure fi re as the last bastion against the arsonists of Communism. Likening the Communists to arsonists and incendiaries was not a particularly new idea, but nor was it strictly inaccurate. To a great extent the analogy had been cemented in connection with the Bolsheviks’ iconoclastic attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church."(87)

[Want - zoals Fishburn duidelijk maakt - de communisten konden er ook wat van. Ook bij Stalin en in de Comintern was er sprake van voortdurende censuur en van het op allerlei manieren vernietigen van cultuur. Veel linkse intellectuelen wisten niet hoe ze dat moesten hanteren en hadden de neiging het fascisme op dat punt te bestrijden en niets te zeggen over het communisme omdat ze hoopten dat het communisme een betere wereld tot stand zou brengen. Maar dat viel uiteindelijk nogal tegen.]

"Adherents from both sides began to tread increasingly predictable paths. Most conservatives sadly decried the Republicans as little more than triggerhappy arsonists, devoted to burning the churches of Spain. Some, like the Catholic priest John A. Toomey and the Jesuit sociologist Joseph F. Thorning, hinted darkly at Jewish manipulation of the press. Arnold Lunn lamented that Communist vandalism had destroyed the ‘world famous Camara Santo and the 40,000 volumes of the Oviedo University Library’. In turn, pro-Republicans like Anna Louise Strong documented an attack on the Prado by ‘fascist bombers with illuminating flares’ and the dropping of 18 bombs on the National Library. It began to look like simple arithmetic: the Communists will burn your churches and the fascists your books (Figures 12 and 13)."(87-88)

"Orwell knew what he was about in Animal Farm when, in the first days of their liberation, he showed the animals capering with joy as they burn everything from the hated whips to Boxer’s old straw hat on the rubbish fire."(90)

"The end of the decade [1930s] was also a period during which the Soviet Union’s self-presentation as a paradise for the writer started to look even shabbier."(94)

"In the West, staunch supporters of Soviet Communism had to undergo their first ideological struggle when the show trials began in December 1936."(94)

"The final ironic corollary of the efforts of the Library of the Burned Books has been provided by recent research on the vastness of the subterranean literary purge in the Soviet Union. Largely ignored at the time (the few who did comment on it were dismissed as fervid anti-Communists), work by M.Z. Zelenov has shown that as early as 1929 the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party decreed a review of libraries, including the introduction of regularly reviewed blacklists, to be administered by Glavlit, the state censors. Although the process went through periodic reversals and internal critiques, it continued largely unabated for the next decade until Glavlit, showing the inevitable logic of destruction, ordered its own lists destroyed in July 1938. Zelenov, who is cautious about drawing too many conclusions from the scrappy paperwork that is extant, estimates that in the years 1938/39 alone, approximately 24 million books were confiscated for destruction from libraries and booksellers." [mijn nadruk] (95)

(97) 5 - ‘Swing, They’re Burning Books’

"The most thorough rewriting of the book burning would have to wait, naturally enough, for the first years of the war. Countless pamphlets and articles were quickly published defining resistance to National Socialism as part of the defence of civilization, but as the war progressed, this rather vague obligation would cohere around the striking and rejuvenated image of the books burned in 1933. It was, that is, only because of the demands of wartime propaganda, especially on the American Home Front, that fascist barbarism became firmly linked to the bookfires, and a truly orthodox position on book burning was forged." [mijn nadruk] (99)

"A tangible shift was taking place, embellishing the memory of the Nazi book burnings so that they functioned as an unheeded warning. "(100)

[Boekverbrandingen worden dan voortaan als typisch gezien voor totalitair denken en regeren. Het geklets over vrijheid en de vrije wereld was weer niet van de lucht. "Kijk eens hoe beschaafd wij hier zijn!' was zo'n beetje de attitude. Er was een groot raakvlak met propaganda. Maar de Amerikanen hadden wat dat betreft natuurlijk boter op hun hoofd met alle - in feite even totalitaire - censuur die daar plaatsvond.]

"Bayles reminded her fellow-librarians that if the United States wanted to promote itself as a country which builds libraries rather than burns books, a logical first step would be to stop filming their officials burning tons of subversive literature – especially since if books had to be destroyed, then pulping was such an economically viable alternative. Books would still have to be destroyed, but it was important not to give any impression of enjoying the event."(107)

"Throughout the war, the interdiction against book burning developed alongside vigorous encouragement for what one author unsentimentally called ‘patriotic pulping’ – particularly in Britain, waste-paper drives were commonplace."(107)

[Het ging dus om het behouden van papier vanwege tekorten. Censuur was niet het doel van dat versnipperen en verpulveren van boeken. Nou ... In de praktijk toch ook wel, zo blijkt dan.]

"The hope that was generated by wartime propaganda made the line between civilization and barbarism absolute, backed up with the constantly reiterated belief that the symbolic fires of the Nazis would be consumed by a much older torch and a much purer flame. In this regard, the symbol of the burning book became one of the most important motifs of American propaganda, which struggled to depict it as simultaneously the most real threat to civilization, and inherently futile. In particular, book burning was the perfect foil to the ideals of free speech, which may help explain why the reports which adopted its imagery in the first hard years of the war were dominated by a tone of rough optimism."(116)

(118) 6 - Beauty for Ashes

Door de nazi's gestolen kunstwerken kregen na WO II veel aandacht, de massa's gestolen boeken niet.

"Nonetheless, as the war drew to a close many librarians took the lead offered by a few exiled European scholars and sought to record and prevent losses to major collections, but also to plan for the return of looted books to their original homes. "(119)

"The losses were immense: after the war Poland reported to the United Nations that of 22.5 million books lodged in prewar libraries, some 15 million were estimated to have been lost or destroyed. However, while Poland was often used as an example of what could be expected under Nazi rule, there is a sense that despite the efforts of the Polish government in exile, including their famous Black Book, the sheer scale of destruction was almost impossible to comprehend, and not always widely accepted in the West. " [mijn nadruk] (122)

"Suffice to say that such destruction was the hallmark of Nazi rule throughout Eastern Europe. The former Czechoslovakia lost over 100 private and public libraries and an estimated 2 million volumes. The libraries of Romania were stripped of some 300,000 volumes, while in Hungary, Hitler’s ally until early 1944, nearly all small libraries were decimated and there were heavy losses to the main collections in Budapest. Conditions were similarly destructive in the Baltic States, which had been given a blacklist of nearly 4,000 titles when they were initially occupied by the Soviet Union; conditions deteriorated still further under Nazi occupation. As Sem C. Sutter has chronicled, the libraries in Vilna, Lithuania, were among the first casualties of the German occupation, and would be the site of some of the most systematic looting and vicious destruction, despite the efforts of the so-called Paper Brigade, expert sorters brought in from the ghetto, who tried to hide titles in an attempt to save them from being sold for waste paper (one of their number, the poet Abraham Sutzkever, even managed to salvage some especially precious manuscripts after receiving permission to take home waste paper to burn for heating). (...) The scale of losses within the Soviet Union itself was colossal, with recent scholarship estimating between 100 million and 200 million books destroyed through combined military and ideological attacks. Such figures are difficult to comprehend, but at Nuremberg the Russian prosecution tried to give it a human scale in a lengthy brief to the court depicting the attack in the East as the deliberate ‘destruction of the national culture of the peoples in the occupied territories’ and as fundamental to the ‘general plan for world domination established by Hitler’s conspirators’." [mijn nadruk] (125)

[Schokkend ... ]

"This unease may be one of the reasons why comparatively little research has been done on the enormous task of restoring looted books compared to the fine arts, as is hinted in the dashing monograph Salt Mines and Castles (1946) by Thomas Carr Howe, an MFAA officer and art conservator. Howe was evidently relieved that his field of expertise kept him from the book depots, commenting that of all the problems they faced, ‘none was more baffling than that of the books at Offenbach’. This was the Offenbach Archival Depot, the greatest warehouse of looted books and religious items in occupied Germany, and a temporary home for several million volumes, housed in the completely undamaged former IG Farben building in Frankfurt am Main." [mijn nadruk] (133)

"Perhaps the destruction of these records might serve as a reminder that the importance of salvaging books and archives had not always been clearly defined within the occupation government, nor, indeed, within the MFAA, where the first trained librarian was assigned as late as September 1945."(133)

"Disgust at the scale of destruction is uppermost, but it is infused with the anguished realization that a full restitution of the books was simultaneously necessary and yet partially impossible. Of the original owners and their communities, only the piles of books remained ..."(135)

"It was the MFAA, particularly the officers detailed to return books from the looted libraries of Europe, who were in a position to understand the intimate relationship between cultural annihilation and physical genocide. The symbolism of book burning took shape as an integral part of the concentration camp universe. " [mijn nadruk] (139)

(140) 7 - Funeral Pyres

"For the men and women of the Western Allies, soldiers and civilians alike, the devastation wrought in the cities of Germany was stupefying. Even for those who were to some extent inured to destruction by the battlefields of North Africa and Europe, the shattered ruins of Germany were shocking, not least because of the realization that such conditions were due, in large part, to the aerial bombing campaign. Especially in the United States, there had been an enduring belief in the unearthly accuracy of Allied bombing, especially in the daylight raids of the USAAF in Europe. This belief had its enduring and enigmatic symbol in the famous Norden bombsight that could, its advertising fatuously reiterated, put a ‘bomb into a pickle barrel’. The pervasiveness of this rhetoric meant that even an experienced reporter such as Percy Knauth from Time magazine was genuinely awed by the evidence that ‘in the Battle for Berlin a lot of our American bombardiers ... did not even aim’." [mijn nadruk] (140)

"The duties of the MFAA were not, after all, simply cultural. Not only did they hope to reverse, as far as possible, the effects of Nazi looting, but they also formed a critical part of the attempt to ensure that National Socialism was extinguished, and one of their major tasks was to help prepare briefs for the prosecution at Nuremberg. They were part, that is, of the attempt to completely alter German society by removing the old hierarchy and replacing it with a completely new system."(143)

"All over Germany, official archives had to be assessed or salvaged. The Nazi bureaucracy were, as Fresco comments, ‘obsessional archivists’, and yet as the Third Reich collapsed it began to destroy its own traces.(...) Indeed, despite such efforts, the Nazi bureaucracy left a paper trail so immense that it can trap people into an illusion of completeness – as if, media theorist Friedrich Kittler noted caustically, ‘anything that ever happened ended up in libraries’. To the contrary, there was a rush to burn incriminating evidence ..."(143-144)

"Despite such actions, an immense number of archives and documents were captured: in occupied Germany alone, the MFAA described the task as ‘colossal’."(144)

"The bureaucratic record of the Nazi regime was one aspect of the occupation, but generally denazification was more concerned with the publication and the infl uence of books, as many attempts were made to curtail their power. Although the logic behind this new censorship was clear, its practical application, as ever, was difficult to legislate, and the influence of books hard to quantify. "(144)

[Tja, daarna krijg je natuurlijk censuur van de andere kant. De ene ideologie wil de andere verdringen. In dit geval wel erg begrijpelijk.]

"However, the demand to remove the Nazi taint from the country meshed, neatly enough, with the rhetoric that referred to Germany as a blank slate to be rewritten: it was to be the Stunde Null, the Hour Zero of an entirely new Germany (one thinks of the resetting of the French Revolutionary calendar in 1793). This has important ramifications for ‘denazification’ – a suitably impressive if terribly vague term, meant to signify extinguishing Nazi ideas, not only from public life, but from the hearts of the German people. In turn, this would rely on the ‘re-education’ of the German people, a process which depended largely on forced exposure to the recently discovered camps, either in person or through film and print media, in order to foster a sense of collective guilt. (...) This dismantling had decided relevance to the specific question of books, which were viewed both as a poisonous legacy of the Third Reich but also – especially with regard to school textbooks – as one of the more important tools for reconstruction. " [mijn nadruk] (146)

"Although largely ad hoc, the number of books being burned and stolen had serious implications for German archives and libraries ..."(147)

"There was almost nothing new to publish, production was hampered by every imaginable shortage, and everything had to go through the bureaucratic filters of various zone authorities. Most of all, the few journalists who had managed to find work were keen, self-evidently, to keep their valuable licences intact, and were often tacitly uncritical of occupation policy. "(151)

"Conditions were even worse in the devastated German libraries, particularly in the capital, as can be seen in a report by Leroy H. Linder on the state of libraries in all four zones of Berlin, commissioned in 1946 by the American Library Journal. Although Linder’s information is hazy and sometimes conflicting, it is a succinct review of the devastation, strewn with telling notes: ‘Completely bombed out. No trace remains’; ‘Completely burned out’; ‘Completely destroyed during the battle of Berlin’; ‘destroyed during an air raid’. Of the two biggest libraries, the Preussische Staatsbibliothek was estimated to have lost 2 million books; and, of the original 4 million in the Ratsbibliothek, 1.5 million were listed as destroyed and 1.1 million more as having been evacuated and not yet recovered. Indeed, of the 64 libraries Linder studied, 18 had been completely destroyed by bombardment, and only a handful had survived the war effectively unscathed.(...) ... the vast bulk of the losses to German libraries were due to the Allied air raids. " [mijn nadruk] (151)

[Ook schokkend.]

"Although contemporary Soviet records are often lax, and there has been a long history of unwillingness to be entirely forthright about this process, estimates of the number of books removed from German institutional holdings range from around 5.5 million to 11 million books, a significant percentage being technical and scientific works. The Soviet government had already shown themselves to be adept at serious and thorough purges of their own libraries, and now they vigorously prosecuted their new Index.(...) In the western zones, there were no punitive restitutions and no Index, although they did use the Soviet list as a research tool, a difference summarized in Lester K. Born’s note that the basic formula was ‘purification in the west ... purge in the east’."(152)

"formalized by the Allied Control Council in Berlin, especially their order regarding ‘Confiscation of Literature and Material of a Nazi and Militarist Nature’ (May 1946). Drafted, as its preamble announced, to ‘eradicate as soon as possible National Socialist, Fascist, Militarist and Anti-Democratic ideas in all forms’, it called on libraries, bookstores and publishers to hand over all pro-Nazi propaganda (especially mentioning ‘racial’ theories and ‘incitements to aggression’). The order ceded full control to the military government, but responsibility still rested with the owners of ‘such literature’ and the local authorities. It concluded: ‘All publications and material mentioned in this order shall be placed at the disposal of the Military Zone Commanders for destruction.’ Attached was a representative list, which hollowly insisted that it was only for ‘illustrative purposes’ – as Margaret Steig has commented, it would be hard to imagine any ‘sensible German’ leaving any of the listed titles on their shelves. This really only formalized occupation practice, but the announcement of the planned destruction created what Steig has called ‘near hysteria’."(152)

[Nou, dan was er in de praktijk denk ik nauwelijks verschil tussen de aanpak van de Westerse mogenheden en die van de Sowjets.]

"The point of the order was always to ensure that the German public had no access to the material and, as had been the case throughout the war, the Western powers eschewed the now politically tactless policy of burning for the politically viable option of pulping."(153)

"While in the Soviet zone the confiscations based on the Index were ongoing, in the American zone there was subtler coercion."(157)

(160) Postscript: The Path of Cinders

"The history of book burning that has been the subject of this book deserves to be drawn to a conclusion with a glimpse of how the symbol operated in the second half of the twentieth century. As the last chapter implies, people certainly did not simply stop destroying books. To the contrary, this postscript is short of necessity, as a history of political, religious, and personal censorship in the second half of the twentieth century, especially under authoritarian regimes, would make – and indeed, already has made – a study of its own. Such a study might usefully compare the cultural implications of censorship, to name a few obvious contenders, in Argentina, Cambodia, China, Iran, South Africa and the Soviet Union. Even then, such a list would tend to overlook the impact of more quotidian censorship, which is common to all countries. " [mijn nadruk] (160)

[En laten we hierbij de Verenigde Staten niet vergeten. Want wat is een "authoritarian regime", nietwaar? Het feit dat je jezelf aanduidt als "the land of the free" en heilig gelooft in vrijheid van meningsuiting sluit in de praktijk helemaal niet uit dat er sprake is van een overal aanwezige (zelf)censuur, bijvoorbeeld op basis van religieuze overtuigingen.]

Volgen een aantal uitwerkingen bij de zeven hoofdstukken van het boek.

"As countless other examples could attest, such as the fires at American libraries in Jakarta and Cairo in 1964, book burning remained a compelling symbol of resistance to repressive cultural norms, and continued to be a recognized form of protest. More recently Muslims around the world burned Rushdie’s Satanic Verses due to the fatwa, and fundamentalist Christian groups routinely make a point of burning J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books"(166)

Met een bibliografie per hoofdstuk die de moeite waard is.