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Nazi book burnings
The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union (German: Deutsche Studentenschaft, DSt) to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. These included books written by Jewish, half-Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist, and sexologist authors among others. The initial books burned were those of Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky, but the burned books came to include other authors, including the works of Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Magnus Hirschfeld, and effectively any book incompatible with Nazi ideology. In a campaign of cultural genocide, books were also burned en masse by the Nazis in occupied territories, such as Poland.
In Dresden, on March 7 and 8, 1933, the Sturmabteilung raided a book store and a newspaper editorial office linked to the SPD. They burned magazines, newspapers, fiction, works by banned authors, as well as leaflets and files.
On April 8, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union (DSt) proclaimed a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit", which was to climax in a literary purge or "cleansing" ("Säuberung") by fire. According to historian Karl Dietrich Bracher:
[T]he exclusion of "Left", democratic, and Jewish literature took precedence over everything else. The black-lists ... ranged from Bebel, Bernstein, Preuss, and Rathenau through Einstein, Freud, Brecht, Brod, Döblin, Kaiser, the Mann brothers, Zweig, Plievier, Ossietzky, Remarque, Schnitzler, and Tucholsky, to Barlach, Bergengruen, Broch, Hoffmannsthal, Kästner, Kasack, Kesten, Kraus, Lasker-Schüler, Unruh, Werfel, Zuckmayer, and Hesse. The catalogue went back far enough to include literature from Heine and Marx to Kafka.
Local chapters were to supply the press with releases and commissioned articles, sponsor well-known Nazis to speak at public gatherings, and negotiate for radio broadcast time. The DSt had contacted an official from the Propaganda Ministry to request support for their campaign, including having Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels be the main speaker at the event in Berlin. Because Goebbels had studied under several Jewish professors, and had, in the past, praised them despite his avowed antisemitism, he was afraid that speaking at the book burning would cause these past remarks to be dug up by his enemies. As a result, he did not formally accept the invitation to speak – despite his having been listed in the advance publicity – until the last moment.
On the same day, the Student Union published the "Twelve Theses", a title chosen to be evocative of two events in German history: Martin Luther's burning of a papal bull when he posted his Ninety-five Theses in 1517, and the burning of a handful of items, including 11 books, at the 1817 Wartburg Festival on the 300th anniversary of Luther's burning of the bull. This was, however, a false comparison, as the "book burnings" at those historic events were not acts of censorship, nor destructive of other people's property, but purely symbolic protests, destroying only one individual document of each title, for a grand total of 12 individual documents, without any attempt to suppress their content, whereas the Student Union burned tens of thousands of volumes, all they could find from a list comprising around 4000 titles.
The "Twelve Theses" called for a "pure" national language and culture. Placards publicized the theses, which attacked "Jewish intellectualism", asserted the need to "purify" German language and literature, and demanded that universities be centres of German nationalism. The students described the action as a “response to a worldwide Jewish smear campaign against Germany and an affirmation of traditional German values.”
On 6 May 1933, the Berlin chapter of the German Student Union made an organised attack on Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sex Research).
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Nazi book burnings
The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union (German: Deutsche Studentenschaft, DSt) to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. These included books written by Jewish, half-Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist, and sexologist authors among others. The initial books burned were those of Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky, but the burned books came to include other authors, including the works of Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Magnus Hirschfeld, and effectively any book incompatible with Nazi ideology. In a campaign of cultural genocide, books were also burned en masse by the Nazis in occupied territories, such as Poland.
In Dresden, on March 7 and 8, 1933, the Sturmabteilung raided a book store and a newspaper editorial office linked to the SPD. They burned magazines, newspapers, fiction, works by banned authors, as well as leaflets and files.
On April 8, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union (DSt) proclaimed a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit", which was to climax in a literary purge or "cleansing" ("Säuberung") by fire. According to historian Karl Dietrich Bracher:
[T]he exclusion of "Left", democratic, and Jewish literature took precedence over everything else. The black-lists ... ranged from Bebel, Bernstein, Preuss, and Rathenau through Einstein, Freud, Brecht, Brod, Döblin, Kaiser, the Mann brothers, Zweig, Plievier, Ossietzky, Remarque, Schnitzler, and Tucholsky, to Barlach, Bergengruen, Broch, Hoffmannsthal, Kästner, Kasack, Kesten, Kraus, Lasker-Schüler, Unruh, Werfel, Zuckmayer, and Hesse. The catalogue went back far enough to include literature from Heine and Marx to Kafka.
Local chapters were to supply the press with releases and commissioned articles, sponsor well-known Nazis to speak at public gatherings, and negotiate for radio broadcast time. The DSt had contacted an official from the Propaganda Ministry to request support for their campaign, including having Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels be the main speaker at the event in Berlin. Because Goebbels had studied under several Jewish professors, and had, in the past, praised them despite his avowed antisemitism, he was afraid that speaking at the book burning would cause these past remarks to be dug up by his enemies. As a result, he did not formally accept the invitation to speak – despite his having been listed in the advance publicity – until the last moment.
On the same day, the Student Union published the "Twelve Theses", a title chosen to be evocative of two events in German history: Martin Luther's burning of a papal bull when he posted his Ninety-five Theses in 1517, and the burning of a handful of items, including 11 books, at the 1817 Wartburg Festival on the 300th anniversary of Luther's burning of the bull. This was, however, a false comparison, as the "book burnings" at those historic events were not acts of censorship, nor destructive of other people's property, but purely symbolic protests, destroying only one individual document of each title, for a grand total of 12 individual documents, without any attempt to suppress their content, whereas the Student Union burned tens of thousands of volumes, all they could find from a list comprising around 4000 titles.
The "Twelve Theses" called for a "pure" national language and culture. Placards publicized the theses, which attacked "Jewish intellectualism", asserted the need to "purify" German language and literature, and demanded that universities be centres of German nationalism. The students described the action as a “response to a worldwide Jewish smear campaign against Germany and an affirmation of traditional German values.”
On 6 May 1933, the Berlin chapter of the German Student Union made an organised attack on Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sex Research).
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