The Burning of Books

Books – the mark of a civilisation

When tyrants assume power, one of the first things they do is try to eradicate history, through the destruction of cultural artifacts, and most specifically books:

• The Spanish Inquisition was established in 1480; one of its first acts was to burn Jewish books
• On May 10, 1933 Goebbels organised a mass burning of books across Germany to obliterate the ‘un-Germanic spirit’ present in the land and purify the German culture
• From May 1966 onwards, during the ‘Cultural Revolution’, Chairman Mao enforced the burning of books by students and the Red Guards; books were  even used to beat teachers in order to humiliate the ‘bourgeois’ elements which Mao claimed to have infiltrated society

In all of the above examples, the burning of books was the precursor to atrocities; thousands of Jews were burned at the stake during the Inquisition, six million were murdered in the Holocaust and many millions were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.

In 1821, the German poet Henrich Heine uttered this prescient comment over 100 years before the start of the Second World War

Once they have burned books, they will end up burning human beings

What drives intelligent people to destroy books?

Tyrants are one thing, but what about the authors themselves?

• Preservation of reputation: Graham Greene burnt all copies of his first book of poems, Babbling April, whenever he could get hold of them,whilst Phillip Larkin instructed his secretary to burn all his diaries three days before he died
• Last wishes: when Virgil died, he left instructions that his manuscript of  The Aeneid was to burnt as he considered it imperfect, and Franz Kafka similarly asked for all his manuscripts to be destroyed.
• Embarassment: in 1668, Pepys bought a pornographic French book, The School for Girls, in which an older woman instructed a younger one in the ways in which she could intensify her sexual pleasure. He claimed that ‘a sober man’ might read it in order to ‘inform himself of the villainy of the world’, but burnt it nonetheless so that ‘it might not be among my books to my shame’.
• Vanity: although in Brecht’s tongue-in-cheek poem [see below] illustrates beautifully how nobody likes to be left out if only ‘worthy books’ are being burned!

The Book Burnings, by Berthold Brecht

When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned, and all around
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, one banished poet
One of the best, discovered, studying the list of the burnt

To his horror, that his books
Had been forgotten. He hurried to his desk
On wings of rage and wrote a letter to the powers that be.
Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me!

Don’t do this to me! Don’t pass me over! Have I not always told
The truth in my books? And now
I am treated by you as a liar!

I command you!
Burn me!

 

However, perhaps the last word should be left to John Milton, from his pamphlet Areopagitica, in his defence of free speech:

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on the purpose to a life beyond life