When I think about book burning, the first image that comes to mind is a Nazi rally in early 1933 in Berlin, in the course of which about 20,000 books were put to the torch. These were works by Jewish authors and others considered by the Nazi regime to be “degenerate.” I would have been proud to have my own books among those of Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Ernest Hemingway. That’s pretty good company on the pyre.
But for sheer scope of destruction, that Nazi rally can’t compare with the burning of the Library of Alexandria by Julius Caesar in 48BC.
It’s very hard for us to imagine the magnitude of such a disaster. We live in an era of mechanized reproductions. In the ancient world, books were copied painstakingly by hand. All known examples of a book — or of an author’s work, or even a whole school of thought — could vanish in the course of a single firelit night.
The Library of Alexandria served as a the greatest center of research and cross-pollination of ideas in the ancient world. A close analogy to its destruction might be losing, say, two-thirds of the Internet, including Wikipedia; Project Gutenberg; Google Maps, Books, and Images; and most of the government and university websites around the world.
And not having backup servers.
Military campaigns often prove fatal to libraries. And not just ancient ones, either. In 2003, following the invasion of Iraq, Iraq’s national library and the Islamic library in central Baghdad were destroyed. Among the treasures lost was one of the oldest surviving copies of the Qur’an.
Or “Koran,” as it’s known in Florida.
Religious intolerance has led to some great moments in book burning. In the 1480s, Tomas Torquemada, of Spanish Inquisition fame, promoted the burning of non-Catholic books, especially of the Jewish and Islamic variety. But the Catholics didn’t limit their book-burning to non-Christians. In 1624, six years into the Thirty Years War, the Pope ordered the burning of Martin Luther’s Protestant translation of the New Testament.
Not to pick on Catholics or anything. To this day, there are Jews in Jerusalem who burn the New Testament; Muslims in Gaza who burn the Hebrew Bible; and Christians in our own country who burn the Qur’an.
Three great monotheisms, united in the destruction of each other’s holy books.
Granted, these are extremists who often have the basest of motives. But extremists interest me.
The burning part interests me, too. Why book burning, versus book burying, or book drowning?
From the very first stirrings of human culture, fire has played a central role in our spiritual life. Fire was seen as a purifier, a magical element that could transform earthly flesh and bone into divine smoke.
Fire was the substance of gods. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this was reflected in the “Burning Bush;” the “Pillar of Fire;” and the “tongues of flames” signifying the Holy Spirit.
One of the ways of pleasing the Lord was by a “burnt offering,” in which the sacrifice was completely consumed by the flames, as opposed to merely cooked by them and sharing the edible parts among worshippers.
The idea of the burnt offering was taken up by the Greeks in the form of the “holocaust,” which literally means “wholly burnt,” as in, an animal sacrificed and then burnt for the gods alone.
“Holocaust” means something quite different to us today. It’s true that the Nazis burned the corpses of their concentration camp victims. But many modern Jews dislike the religious overtones of the word “Holocaust,” which seems to suggest that the victims were being offered up as a religious sacrifice, when what was actually happening was industrial cremation. In some circles, the Hebrew word “Shoah,” meaning simply “destruction,” is the preferred alternative.
Book burning is an act of protest, the symbolic destruction of collection of symbols on a page. Ironically, burning a book, which would seem to be about setting a limit on free speech, requires freedom of speech. The act of destroying a repugnant text requires the license to destroy repugnant texts. How far do you suppose the Nazi brownshirts would have gotten if they’d tried to burn Hitler’s own Mein Kampf instead of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital?
One of the authors whose books the Nazis torched in 1933 was the Jewish journalist and poet Heinrich Heine, who in the early 19th century wrote these darkly prophetic words: “Where books are burned, in the end people will burn.”
That may have been true in Germany, but I don’t think it’s true in the United States. I believe our society is strong enough to tolerate the burning of books – or bras, or obscene DVDs, or even flags.
People who burn things in anger labor under a serious misapprehension, a kind of magical thinking that goes all the way back to caveman times. They think that fire has the power to make the bad thing disappear.
But burning a symbol doesn’t destroy the mind, heart, or spirit that created it.
All it destroys is the soul of the person holding the match.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 16 September 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
