During World War II, in what Nazi officials called a “literary purge,” thousands of books burned in public bonfires, in universities, and on the streets of German cities.

On May 10, 1933, about 25,000 volumes were burned, classified as banned for having ideas contrary to Nazism or for being works by Jewish authors. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and Public Information, led the event that citizens in Berlin, under the slogan “No to social decay!”

Photo: Cordon Press

Today, 90 years after the literary carnage, Germany sadly remembers the event.

“90 years ago, when tens of thousands of books by Jewish and politically dissident authors went up in flames, these were the hours when National Socialist Germany destroyed the freedom of literature and art and began to expel or later deliberately kill the bearers. of German culture,” Claudia Roth, Minister of Culture, recalled at a memorial service.

He added that “70,000 people watched as hatred burned, books burned, and the systematic persecution and murder of Jews, political dissidents and many others unfolded.”

According to the official, “many authors then paid with their lives for the persecution they were subjected to, but some survived because they could flee to free states and go into exile there.”

At the event, organized by the Berlin State Library, extracts were read from works by authors who were blacklisted, censored and persecuted in National Socialist Germany.

Kai Wegner, the mayor of Berlin, called the book burning on May 10, 1933 an “act of barbarism” and an “act of ideological terror” that preceded “the heinous crimes committed during the National Socialist tyranny”.

“That is why I find it all the more important that Berlin offers a safe home to persecuted and threatened authors from all over the world. In Berlin, they can work and develop freely and independently, without fear of persecution and censorship,” he added.