The Book Thieves

Description

“A chilling reminder of Hitler’s twisted power.” —BBC

For readers of The Monuments Men and The Hare with Amber Eyes, the story of the Nazis’ systematic pillaging of Europe’s libraries, and the small team of heroic librarians now working to return the stolen books to their rightful owners.

While the Nazi party was being condemned by much of the world for burning books, they were already hard at work perpetrating an even greater literary crime. Through extensive new research that included records saved by the Monuments Men themselves—Anders Rydell tells the untold story of Nazi book theft, as he himself joins the effort to return the stolen books. When the Nazi soldiers ransacked Europe’s libraries and bookshops, large and small, the books they stole were not burned. Instead, the Nazis began to compile a library of their own that they could use to wage an intellectual war on literature and history. In this secret war, the libraries of Jews, Communists, Liberal politicians, LGBT activists, Catholics, Freemasons, and many other opposition groups were appropriated for Nazi research, and used as an intellectual weapon against their owners. But when the war was over, most of the books were never returned. Instead many found their way into the public library system, where they remain to this day.

Now, Rydell finds himself entrusted with one of these stolen volumes, setting out to return it to its rightful owner. It was passed to him by the small team of heroic librarians who have begun the monumental task of combing through Berlin’s public libraries to identify the looted books and reunite them with the families of their original owners. For those who lost relatives in the Holocaust, these books are often the only remaining possession of their relatives they have ever held. And as Rydell travels to return the volume he was given, he shows just how much a single book can mean to those who own it.”A most valuable book.” —Christian Science Monitor

“Rydell’s tale is a fascinating blend of intellectual history, detective story, and “restitution activism” that cannot help but inspire its readers.” —LA Review of Books

“A chilling reminder of Hitler’s twisted power.” —BBC

“This history can still startle and surprise us; that, as researchers ask new questions and follow new leads, revelations are still possible . . . Rydell’s passion for the subject is undeniable. Serving as a courier, he manages to convey the emotional power of returning even a single book to a grateful descendant who has lost so much else.” —The Chicago Tribune

“Reader-friendly and a riveting account, the book deserves a large readership.” —Jack Fischel, The Jewish Book Council

“An erudite exploration of the systematic plundering of libraries and book collections by Nazi invaders. Looting books by mainly Jewish owners, collections, and libraries was an effective way of stealing Jewish memory and history, as this thorough work of research by Swedish journalist and editor Rydell attests . . . An Engrossing, haunting journey for bibliophiles and World War II historians alike.” —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)Anders Rydell is a journalist, editor, and author of nonfiction. As the Head of Culture at a major Swedish media group, Rydell directs the coverage of arts and culture in 14 newspapers. His two books on the Nazis, The Book Theives and The Looters, have been translated into 16 languages. The Book Thieves is his first work published in English.
 
Henning Koch was born in Sweden but has spent most of his life in England, Spain, and Sardinia. Most recently he translated A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. He has also written a short story collection, Love Doesn’t Work, and a novel, The Maggot People.1. A Fire That Consumes the World

Berlin

“Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned too.” -Heinrich Heine, 1820

These words are engraved on a rusty red metal plate sunk into the cobblestones of Bebelplatz in Berlin. Berlin’s summer tourists wander past the square, situated between Brandenburger Tor and Museumsinsel, on their way to see one of the city’s more grandiose sights. The location still holds symbolic tension. In one corner of the square stands an elderly woman with tousled white hair. She has wrapped herself in a big Israeli flag-the Star of David across her back. Another war has broken out in Gaza. Some thirty people have gathered to demonstrate against the anti-Semitic sentiments that, seventy years after the Second World War, are once more reawakening in Europe.

On the other side of the broad, fashionable thoroughfare of Unter den Linden, trestle tables have been put out in front of the gates of Humboldt University. For a few euros one can buy well-thumbed copies of books by Thomas Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, and Stefan Zweig-all authors whose works were thrown into the fire here in May 1933. In front of the tables is a row of cobblestone-size metal plates. Each plate bears a name: Max Bayer, Marion Beutler, Alice Victoria Berta, all of whom once studied at the university. After each name is a date, with a place-name that needs no further explanation: “Mauthausen 1941,” “Auschwitz 1942,” “Theresienstadt 1945.”

Heinrich Heine’s words, actually a line of dialogue from the play Almansor, have since the Second World War been seen as an insightful prophecy of what came to pass here, and the catastrophe that would follow. On May 10, 1933, in Bebelplatz, which at that time was known as Opernplatz, history’s most famous ceremony of book burning was staged-an event that has remained a powerful symbol of totalitarian oppression, cultural barbarism, and the merciless ideological war waged by the Nazis. The flames of the book-burning pyre have also come to symbolize the intimate connection between cultural destruction and the Holocaust.

Earlier that same spring, the Nazis had assumed power in Germany using another fire-the Reichstag fire in February 1933-as a pretext. The Nazis claimed it was the work of Communists and that Germany was threatened by a “Bolshevik plot,” and set in motion the first extensive wave of terror, arresting Communists, Social Democrats, Jews, and others in political opposition. These accusations were fueled by the Nazi Party newspaper, the Všlkischer Beobachter, which had been stirring and agitating for years against Jewish, Bolshevik, pacifist, and cosmopolitan literature, setting the stage for the Nazis’ ascendance.

The Nazis had been sabotaging cultural events since before 1933-everything from “displeasing” film screenings to exhibitions of so-called degenerate art came under attack. In October 1930, Thomas Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize the previous year, attacked the prevailing mood in an open reading held at the Beethoven Hall in Berlin. Joseph Goebbels, tipped off about what was in the offing, had sent twenty Brownshirts from the party’s SA storm troops to the reading, all in black tie to blend in with the audience, a group that included some right-wing intellectuals. Mann’s speech was met with applause from some sections of the audience, and heckling from the saboteurs. Eventually the atmosphere grew so inflamed that Mann was forced to leave the premises by the back entrance.

Threats were even more widespread. The Mann family and writers such as Arnold Zweig and Theodor Plievier had been receiving a constant stream of threatening telephone calls and letters. The homes of writers were vandalized with graffiti. And selected writers were subjected to individual monitoring by SA patrols that waited outside their houses and followed them wherever they went.

Lists of objectionable literature were produced. In August 1932, the Všlkischer Beobachter published a blacklist of writers who should be banned once the party assumed power. Early that same year, a declaration had been published in the same newspaper, supported by the signatures of forty-two German professors, demanding that German literature should be protected against “cultural Bolshevism.” In the winter of 1933, when the Nazis took power, the focus attack against objectionable literature shifted away from the street and into the machinery of state. In February 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg signed a law “for the protection of people and state,” which imposed restrictions on printed publications-further amendments in the spring of the same year imposed more controls on freedom of expression. The first casualties were Communist and Social Democrat newspapers and publishers. Hermann Gšring was charged with leading the battle against so-called dirty literature: Marxist, Jewish, and pornographic books.

It was this attack on literature that led up to the book burnings in May-but in fact the initiative did not come from the Nazi Party, but rather from the Deutsche Studentenschaft-an umbrella organization of German student federations. Several of these student federations had more or less openly been supporting the Nazis since the 1920s. It was not the first time in the interwar period that German right-wing conservative students had made book pyres. In 1922 hundreds of students gathered at the Tempelhof airfield in Berlin to burn “dirty literature,” and in 1920 students in Hamburg burned a copy of the Treaty of Versailles, the terms of surrender that Germany had been forced to sign after the First World War.

The Nazi Party’s attack on literature fed into attacks already being carried out by groups of conservative, right-wing students. For these student groups, book burnings were a German tradition of defiance and resistance going back to the days of Martin Luther and the Reformation. In April 1933 the Deutsche Studentenschaft announced an action against “un-German literature,” casting Adolf Hitler as a new Luther. To evoke the Ninety-five Theses with which Luther began the Reformation, the student federation published its own “theses” in the Všlkischer Beobachter-twelve theses “Wider den undeutschen Geist!” (Against the un-German Spirit).

The students argued that language held the true soul of a people and that German literature for this reason had to be “purified” and liberated from foreign influence. They stated that the Jew was the worst enemy of the German language: “A Jew can only think in a Jewish way. If he writes in German he is lying. The German who writes in German but thinks in an un-German way is a traitor.” The students demanded that all “Jewish literature” should be published in Hebrew and “the un-German spirit eradicated from public libraries.” German universities, according to the students, should be “strongholds for the traditions of the German people.”

Their proclamation was the beginning of a national action to clean out “un-German” literature. Student associations subordinated to Deutsche Studentenschaft at German universities and formed “war committees” to organize coordinated book burnings all over Germany. The book burnings were to be manifested as celebratory events, and the committees were exhorted to market their events, sign up speakers, collect wood for the fires, and seek support from other student federations and their local Nazi leadership. Those who opposed this work, especially teachers, were threatened. The war committees also put up posters with slogans such as “Today the writers, tomorrow the professors.”

But the primary task of the war committees was to collect “unclean” literature for burning. Students were ordered to begin the cleanup in their own private libraries, later expanding to public libraries and local bookshops, many of whom cooperated willingly. In the spring of 1933 a more general blacklist of books and authors also began to be compiled. Wolfgang Herrmann, a librarian who had involved himself with right-wing extremist student groups as early as the 1920s, had been working for several years on a list of literature “worthy of being burned.” The first draft only listed 12 names, but this was soon expanded to 131 writers, subdivided into various categories. They included Communists, ranging from Trotsky and Lenin to Bertolt Brecht; pacifists like Erich Maria Remarque; Jewish intellectuals like Walter Benjamin; and many other literary and intellectual figures who had gained prominence during the Weimar Republic.

Quite apart from critics of nationalism, historians were also blacklisted when their perspective on history did not coincide with that of the Nazis, particularly in books on subjects including the First World War, the Soviet Union, and the Weimar Republic. There were also some thinkers whose global view was utterly rejected by the Nazis, such as Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Both were attacked on the basis of advancing “Jewish science.”

In addition to “cleaning” their own libraries, the students asked public libraries and local bookshops to make a contribution by giving up their own holdings of “dirty literature.” In many instances, university registrars and teachers collaborated with the students to clean out the school libraries.

But the war committees also applied more violent methods, aided by local police and storm troopers from the SA, to get their hands on books. A few days before the book burnings, in early May, the students attacked lending libraries and Communist book dealers. The former were especially hated by conservative forces and were described by Wolfgang Herrmann as “literary brothels” spreading dirty, Jewish, decadent literature among decent, ordinary people. Libraries had become extremely popular since the First World War. On account of the economic depression and inflation in Germany during the interwar years, fewer and fewer Germans could afford to buy their own books. Traditional libraries could not provide for the great demand for books, which led to more than fifteen thousand small lending libraries being set up. These libraries provided a low-cost book-lending service, and bought large volumes of the best sellers of the time such as the works of Thomas Mann. These “people’s libraries” were easy victims for the students, while the SA troops also raided private libraries. One much-publicized raid was carried out against an apartment building in Berlin owned by Schutzverband deutscher Schriftsteller, an organization working to protect German writers actively opposing censorship and other forms of state intervention in literature. Some five hundred of the association’s members living in the building had their apartments searched and vandalized. Suspicious books were confiscated or destroyed on the scene, and writers caught with “socialist” literature were detained.

The most notorious raid was carried out a matter of days before the book burnings, when about a hundred students attacked Institut fŸr Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexual Studies), situated in Tiergarten in Berlin. The institute, founded by the medical doctors Magnus Hirschfeld and Arthur Kronfeld, conducted groundbreaking research into sexuality and also worked to promote the rights of women, homosexuals, and transsexuals. For three hours the students went berserk in the building, pouring paint over carpets, breaking windows, covering the walls in graffiti, and destroying paintings, porcelain, and other household goods. They took away books, the institute’s archive, and a large collection of photographs along with a bust of the founder Magnus Hirschfeld.

Already in 1932, many Jews and Communists, who could see where the political winds were blowing, had begun to clear out their private libraries and destroy photographs, address books, letters, and diaries. The Communists had sent out warnings to their members that if they were carrying “dangerous” documents they had to be prepared to swallow them. In this way there were also thousands of lesser book pyres, where people set fire to their own libraries in stoves, fireplaces, and backyards. They would soon find out that it was easier said than done: burning books is a time-consuming activity. Instead, many people chose to dump their libraries in forests, rivers, or abandoned streets-others posted them anonymously to nonexistent addresses.

After 1933, a large number of German authors chose exile, of their own accord or under duress. Apart from Thomas Mann, they included his brother Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Dšblin, Anna Seghers, Erich Maria Remarque, and hundreds of others. By 1939 some two thousand writers and poets had felt compelled to leave Nazi Germany and Austria. Many of them would never return. But a large number also chose to stay. Some writers who were not expressly political went into what has later been referred to as “interior exile.” They stayed in their German sphere, or “Heimat,” but made the decision not to publish. Alternatively, they released books that were accepted by the board of censors: children’s books, poetry, and historical novels. Others were prevented from publishing their works, because membership in the National Chamber of Literature, a division of Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Public Education and Propaganda, was required before one could be published.

But there was also another group of writers that joined ranks with the regime. In October 1933 a series of German newspapers published a proclamation signed by eighty-eight German writers and poets under the headline Gelšbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, a sort of oath of allegiance. The proclamation was in direct support of Germany’s recent decision to leave the League of Nations. Among the signatories were authors such as Walter Bloem, Hanns Johst, and Agnes Miegel, now mainly forgotten, as their rise and fall is so intimately associated with the regime to which they swore their loyalty.

At the time, great rewards lay in store for authors who embraced National Socialism. Positions previously closed to them in Germany’s most respected literary academies, foundations, and associations began to open. They also laid claim to new groups of readers, once the regime assumed control of the nation’s foremost book clubs. In 1933 the Nazi-run book club Buchergilde Gutenberg had 25,000 members, whereas a few years later its membership had increased to 330,000. By relying on book clubs like this, the regime was able to efficiently distribute everything from Goethe and Schiller to nationalist, conservative, and Nazi writers to millions of readers.

The propaganda ministry instigated a literary and political drive that has never been equaled in German history-and probably not in modern history either. The ministry awarded more than fifty literary prizes annually.

Over the course of the 1930s, Goebbels’s propaganda ministry took complete control of the German book industry, including some 2,500 publishers and 16,000 book dealers and secondhand bookshops. One of the first measures was to weed out “Jewish influence” in the world of books by gradually excluding Jews from academies, literary associations, writers’ professional bodies, publishers, book dealers, and printers. Jewish publishers, printers, and book dealers were “Aryanized”-transferred to Aryan owners. Some of these Jewish publishing houses were among the largest in the industry. For instance, Julius Springer was the world’s largest publisher in the field of scientific publishing. It was a step-by-step process that continued throughout the 1930s. Initially the takeovers of Jewish companies and the exclusion of Jews were cautiously handled, to avoid companies losing value or the disruption of international relations. Jewish owners were simply persuaded to sell, and if they refused, the regime resorted to varying degrees of coercion, harassment, and threats. The Aryanization of publishers raised enormous sums of money for the party, the state, and individual businessmen, and after 1936, the practice was legally formalized in the Nuremberg Laws.US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.8000 × 5.5000 × 8.4000 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780735221239
ISBN-10	0735221235
Author	Anders Rydell, Henning Koch
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	HIS014000, HIS027100
Subjects	war books, HIS014000, genealogy, European history, military history, dad gifts, fathers day gifts, world war 2 books, gifts for history buffs, holocaust books, historical books, hitler, ww 2, genealogy gifts, ww ii, german history, book thief, holocaust studies, history of the holocaust, restitution, Holocaust in Greece, holocaust survivors, holocaust, world war 2, history, gifts for dad, war, fascism, military, WWII, WW2, world war ii, german, Germany, jewish, history books, world history, nazis, world war two, army, HIS027100, censorship, jewish history