A Brill Calendar: May 10

Burning Books...

Few allegorical public performances maintain their iconic status as convincingly as a burning of books before the Humboldt University at Berlin, May 10 1933.

It is difficult, 76 years later, to reconstruct the ‘Zeitgeist’ in the European countries encircling Germany before Hitler became Nazi head of state. At least until the Munich Conference, Hitler’s regime was largely considered to be boorish, populist and ill-mannered, rather than a threat to civilization & mankind. Still, an old proverb exists to the effect that where books are burned, people will be burned.

The reason that the burning of books in ’33 didn’t increase opposition to the Führer and his Third Reich among the democracies may be explained by an idea of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; to the effect that each and every human activity implies always two dimensions, technical and symbolical; one presupposing the other, like there is no difference without similarity. Burning printed, published and disseminated books is a symbolic act of rejection; such a typographical print-run endows its ‘exemplar’ with a fine ‘Shield of Pallas’ against annihilation. Somewhere, sometime a copy may, and will, turn up.

In all forms of ‘Real-politik’, technique and technical effectiveness reign supreme; usually equalling the Symbolic to what isn’t Realistic, denying the axiom that Homo sapiens and Homo symbolicus are birds of a feather; and ants, beavers and bees living proof for the proposition that technical prowess can’t be an exclusive province of human kind.

It is seldom that humanist warnings by artists and scholars, champions of an autonomous Empire of Symbols, were so light-heartedly brushed aside by denizens of a Realm of Technics. Even an exodus after this particular (and very un-merry) month of May out of Germany undertaken by Europe’s intellectual and artistic elite didn’t bring European Powers to stop and break an unprecedentedly barbaric machine on the eve destruction; when it still could have been done.