BURNING THE BOOKS AGAIN!
Holmes, John Haynes
Burning The Books Again! By JOHN HAYNES HOLMES (Chairman, American Civil Liberties Union) WOULD you believe it—that Germany, now in the hands of the guardians of civilization and the custodians...
...The writings of all these authors will be banned...
...Placed in the same conditions, exposed to the same temptations, they will be guilty of the same follies and the same crimes...
...If I went to Germany today under United Nations auspices, I couldn't get a copy...
...And right side of them stand the prodigious volumes of Chamberlain's masterpiece on Immanuel Kant...
...NOW the process is begun again, as Ernest Meyer told you in The Progressive last week...
...Thrice shame to us if, on any excuse, we do these loathsome things...
...What a writer he was...
...And the logic of the whole process of blindness and stupidity was the heaping of these books in the public squares—the hoarded treasures of the universities, and the fresh wares of the busy book-shops—and the burning of them in huge holocausts of flame...
...Here on my shelves are two other editions of Hitler's book, both published in this country...
...Would they help or hinder the acceptance of Hitler's notions of the "new order...
...His books cannot stand on their own worth, but must be damned with their erring author...
...When I was in Germany in 1935,1 took particular pains to get an authorized edition of this influential and historically important work...
...All Nazi writers, of course, are included, and some 2,200 other authors who, although not themselves National Socialists—most of them probably lived before National Socialism was ever heard of!—are yet considered dangerous to the new Allied regime...
...He made a long list of books that were considered hostile to the ideas of the Third Reich and dangerous to its interests...
...They, too, do not trust the human mind...
...Yet We shculd know better...
...It would be almost as badly off as in the old bad days of the Nazis...
...Charles Beard's laudatory reviews...
...What Hitler did in 1933 is perfectly well remembered...
...But one never knows, once a thing like this is started...
...Yes, perhaps so, for they came perilously near making me a Germanophobe of the worst order...
...But Hamsun was foolish, or misled, in the early days of the war...
...But so far as is humanly possible, the books will be outlawed from all public use, and thus effectually banished from German life...
...Most of my libr.ary would then have been burned...
...Perhaps burning may again come in Germany ! There is no sign of it yet...
...By JOHN HAYNES HOLMES (Chairman, American Civil Liberties Union) WOULD you believe it—that Germany, now in the hands of the guardians of civilization and the custodians of culture, is in the business of banning books again ? Not burning them—not yet!—though the blazing pyres of the printed page will probably follow in due course...
...So books by the thousand were listed and banned...
...First on the list, of course, is Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf...
...This action means that the books in question may not be published, sold in book stores, or given out into general circulation by libraries...
...Conditions in this country and in Europe are not the same...
...He compromised himself by publicly expressing admiration for certain of the principles of Nazism...
...ANOTHER banned author is Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the expatriated Englishman who wrote The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which popularized the super-race theory in Germany...
...But they were not selected because they were good, or bad...
...Many of the condemned books, perhaps most of them, were ancient and modern classics...
...An index, or black list, of dead and living authors is being prepared, and will be issued in due course...
...I can't seem to lay hands on my old Treitschke volume, but I remember reading it in 1914, and getting a lot of insight into the whys and wherefores of German militarism...
...The destroyers and successors of the Nazis, the civilized rulers now in occupation of Germany, are going to do what the Nazis did...
...They included some of the really great works of German literature—Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Heine...
...So he must go...
...To this end, it must be cut off from all contact with anything apart from Nazi dogma...
...Well, von Treitschke, the great 19th Century nationalist historian of Germany...
...I can't honestly say that I have read these volumes through—much of their learning and elaborate argumentation were too much for me...
...This is their conception, I suppose, of teaching the German people to know the blessings of democracy...
...There is no imaginable excuse for us to repeat Nazi tricks, or follow Nazi precedents...
...Condemn your enemy—and before you know it, you are yourself doing the very things that stirred your ire against him...
...So this man's writings are dangerous...
...But I shall keep them here on my shelves all the same...
...A month ago I would have said that the mere banning of books by the occupation forces was impossible...
...Here is a special dispatch from Berlin to the New York Herald-Tribune, which tells the story...
...Here on my shelves is his masterwork, Growth of the Soil, and that other fine book of his, Hunger...
...And here is Knut Hamsun, the great* Norwegian novelist, and Nobel Prize winner...
...Be careful, be careful...
...This mind must be conditioned to one set of ideas, one fixed system of thought...
...All are subject to the same physical, mental, and psychological ills...
...He didn't dare to have this mind do any thinking or investigating for itself...
...They are filled with profound compassion for the common people and a deep sense of human brotherhood...
...I have been interested in noting some of the particular titles involved in this sweeping act of condemnation, especially in relation to my own modest library...
...But I read a good part of them, and the rest I got from Prof...
...I have kept thenT©n.smy shelves here all these years...
...There isn't any Nazism in these noble writings...
...They also are afraid of freedom...
...We are going to show them how wrong the Nazis were, and how right we are in all the ways of life...
...But here it is—with Avernus yawning not far away down the "swift descent...
...Temptations are not equal, or even similar...
...And we begin by doing what the Nazis did—banning books...
...IT all goes to show that all men everywhere are much the same...
...respectable publishers, in 1910...
...The authors ineluded in the list are those deemed not fit for German reading...
...Our American publishers apparently did a grossly reprehensible thing when they issued these books, and thus exposed the minds of our people to their foul contagion...
...Why then divide men into angels and demons...
...They would condition German thought in their own particular interest, as the Nazis did formerly in theirs, by binding it fast in the strait-jacket of preconceived opinion and idea...
...Americans, English, Germans, Italians, Russians, Japanese, Indians, Negroes, Jews, Gentiles, Roman Catholics, Protestants—they are all built of the same fundamental substance of human nature...
...Spengler, one of the greatest scholars of his time, is described as "the philosophical precursor of Nazism," and so he has to go...
...Other authors...
...Here it is in my library—two huge volumes...
...I tremble as I look at my copies of Mein Kampf, and think of the damage they may have done to my mind...
...But getting rid of books not liked, and thus doing what can be done to rebar-barize mankind...
...The Fuehrer wanted to bind and fetter the German mind...
...I remember reading the two large volumes of this work in the early days of my ministry-—they were published in London by the John Lane Company, highly...
...Another name on the list of banished books in Berlin is Oswald Spengler, and the book responsible for his disgrace is The Decline of the West...
...Here undoubtedly is the" explanation, or a part of the explanation, of the dangerously perverted condition of my mind...
...So my library wouldn't fare very well in Berlin these days...
...The question was, did they fit into the philosophy of Nazism...
...It is difficult to imagine Americans, Englishmen, or Russians, dumping armfuls of books on raging bonfires, and dancing about the flames like naked savages...
...The forbidden works will not be removed from the library shelves—there will be no searching or stripping of public institutions or private homes...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 44
