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Bebelplatz, Berlin

The book-burning

On May 10, 1933, members of the Nazi German Student Union and their professors burnt books as part of a nationwide action “against the un-German spirit”.

The books to be burnt were chosen according to blacklists made by the librarian Wolfgang Herrmann, which were then used to plunder private bookshelves, public libraries and academic collections. Before the books were burnt, the organisers sent out what they called their “Twelve Theses”, which were to be read at the book-burnings in every town. With the words “Against decadence and moral decay! For discipline and decency in the family and the nation! I commit to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser and Erich Kästner”.

As well as Kästner, the blacklisted authors included Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Heinrich and Klaus Mann, Rosa Luxemburg, August Bebel, Bertha von Suttner and Stefan Zweig. Many of the vilified and persecuted writers had already left Germany and gone into exile.

Erich Kästner stood watching unrecognised as his book Fabian was consumed by the flames. Later he described this dark day with the word “Begräbniswetter” (funeral weather). It rained so hard that the flames kept going out, and the fire brigade had to pour petrol on the fire to get it burning properly.

The sunken library

The memorial shows what is missing. Underground, almost out of sight, no books, empty white shelves, directly under the Bebelplatz. What was lost and burnt were the books by those who the Nazis ostracised and persecuted, who had to leave the country and whose stories were no longer allowed to be told. Symbolically, the underground bookshelves have space for around 20,000 books, as a reminder of the 20,000 books that went up in flames here at the behest of the Nazis.

Interesting but rarely mentioned: most of the content burned that night came from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (institute for the science of sex) headed by Magnus Hirschfeld. The institute and Hirshfeld himself were some of the first to openly campaign for the right to have sex with someone of the same gender, the right to transition if you did not identify with your birth sex and for the general acceptance of queer people. The team had already performed the first SRS operations in Germany and, in addition, the institute advocated sex education, contraception, the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, and women’s emancipation.

Photographs of the night of the book burning are plastered across history books world wide, but the queer movement that was destroyed that night often goes unmentioned.