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?
