Der verbranntem Bucher

A chilling article in Tuesday's The Times, a review of a book about the infamous burning of the books under Hitler in 1933, good writers and bad, Jewish and gentile, men of the left and of the right.  And all, complained Stefan Zweig, without writers protestsing.  Volker Weidermann, the young journalist who has written Das Buch der verbranntem Bücher (The Book of the Burning Books), has read many of the banned list, and found some real gems - but lost for a generation, or for two, or for ever.

George Smiley was undercover in Germany in this period and saw the burning of the books, and rejoiced that he knew his enemy.  Mann was among many who faced a new humiliation:

And for those who did survive till 1945, there was one last, bitter pill to swallow: “Many of the famous authors returning to Germany after the war were devastated to find that there was no audience for them,” Weidermann says. “The public that had burnt their books in 1933 still didn't want them! That was utterly humiliating for someone like Thomas Mann, who thought that there was a ‘better Germany' that would welcome him back.”

This is only just published in German, but I hope it is translated soon: it contains a lesson we cannot forget, a lesson which will bear endless retelling.

Comments

[Mr Cornflower]

Mann broadcast anti-Nazi polemics over the radio from his exile during the war years. The talks, titled "Deutsche Hoerer!" ("German Listeners"!) were vigorous and uncompromising; but in one of his very last broadcasts, immediately after the capitulation of Germany, he began with a phrase which has always seemed to me a shining example of the capacity of a truly great mind for imaginative sympathy:

"How bitter it is when the entire civilised world is rejoicing at the defeat, the abject humiliation of one's beloved country..."

He urged his compatriots to remember that they were not just the dupes, the victims or the accomplices of a loathsome criminal gang but the heirs of a great civilisation, and exhorted them to pick themselves up out of the actual and metaphorical ruins and rebuild that 'better Germany'. The gesture was indeed spurned as far as far as Mann personally was concerned, but it was still a noble act.