Book burning

Book burning (also biblioclasm or libricide) is the practice of destroying, often ceremoniously, books or other written material. In modern times, other forms of media, such as phonograph records, video tapes, and CDs have also been ceremoniously burned or shredded. Book burning is usually carried out in public, and is generally motivated by moral, religious, or political objections to the material.

Book burning can be emblematic of a harsh and oppressive regime which is seeking to censor or silence an aspect of a nation's culture. In some cases the works destroyed are irreplaceable and their burning constitutes a severe loss to cultural heritage. Examples include obliteration of the Library of Baghdad, the burning of books and burying of scholars under China's Qin Dynasty, the destruction of Aztec codices by Itzcoatl, and the Nazi book burnings.

Book burning can be an act of contempt for the book's contents or author, and the act is intended to draw wider public attention to this opinion. Examples include the burning of Wilhelm Reich's books by the FDA, the 2010 Qur'an-burning controversy, and the burning of Beatles records after a remark from John Lennon concerning Jesus Christ.

Art destruction is related to book burning, both because it might have similar cultural, religious or political connotations and because in various historical cases books and artworks were destroyed at the same time.

In all cases, the practice of book or art-burning may be totally counter-productive since it highlights works which might otherwise have languished unread or unseen. It is in any case, impossible to eradicate all copies, and their value will increase in proportion to those destroyed.

Historical background

From the 7th Century BC when Jehoiakim, King of Judah, burned part of the prophet Jeremiah's scroll, (Jeremiah 36), to the present day, the burning of books has a long history as a tool wielded by authorities both secular and religious, in efforts to suppress dissenting or heretical views that are perceived as posing a threat to the prevailing order.

According to scholar Elaine Pagels, "In AD 367, Athanasius, the zealous bishop of Alexandria... issued an Easter letter in which he demanded that Egyptian monks destroy all such unacceptable writings, except for those he specifically listed as 'acceptable' even 'canonical' — a list that constitutes the present 'New Testament'". Although Pagels cites Athanasius's Paschal letter (letter 39) for 367 AD, there is no order for monks to destroy heretical works contained in that letter. Thus, heretical texts do not turn up as palimpsests, washed clean and overwritten, as pagan ones do; many early Christian texts have been as thoroughly "lost" as if they had been publicly burnt.

According to the Chronicle of Fredegar, Recared, King of the Wisigoths (reigned 586–601) and first Catholic king of Spain, following his conversion to Catholicism in 587, ordered that all Arian books should be collected and burned; and all the books of Arian theology were reduced to ashes, with the house in which they had been purposely collected.

Nalanda, an ancient center of higher learning in Bihar, India was sacked by Turkic Muslim invaders under Bakhtiyar Khalji in 1193. The great library of Nalanda University was so vast that it is reported to have burned for three months after the invaders set fire to it, sacked and destroyed the monasteries, and drove the monks from the site.

In his 1821 play, Almansor, the German writer Heinrich Heine — referring to the burning of the Muslim holy book, the Qur'an, during the Spanish Inquisition — wrote, "Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings." ("Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.") Over a century later, Heine's own books were among the thousands of volumes that were torched by the Nazis in Berlin's Opernplatz.

In Azerbaijan, when a modified Latin alphabet was adopted, books published in Arabic script were burned, especially in the late 1920s and 1930s. The texts were not limited to the Quran; medical and historical manuscripts were also destroyed.

Book burning following the 1973 coup that installed the Pinochet regime in Chile.

Copies of books which were burned by the Nazis, on display at Yad Vashem

Anthony Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873, inscribed book burning on its seal, as a worthy goal to be achieved. Comstock's total accomplishment in a long and influential career is estimated to have been the destruction of some 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates for printing such 'objectionable' books, and nearly 4,000,000 pictures. All of this material was defined as "lewd" by Comstock's very broad definition of the term — which he and his associates successfully lobbied the United States Congress to incorporate in the Comstock Law.

In the 1950s several books by William Reich were ordered to be burned in the U.S. under judicial orders.

The advent of the digital age has resulted in an immense collection of written work being catalogued exclusively or primarily in digital form. The intentional deletion or removal of these works has been often referred to as a new form of book burning.

Some supporters have celebrated book burning cases in art and other media. Such is the bas-relief by Giovanni Battista Maini of The Burning of Heretical Books over a side door on the façade of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, which depicts the burning of 'heretical' books as a triumph of righteousness.

Notable book burnings and destruction of libraries

Main articles: List of book burning incidents and List of destroyed libraries

Nazi Germany

In 1933, Nazis burned works of Jewish authors, and other works considered "un-German", at the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin.

The works of some Jewish authors and other so-called "degenerate" books were burnt by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. Richard Euringer, director of the libraries in Essen, identified 18,000 works deemed not to correspond with Nazi ideology, which were publicly burned.

On May 10, 1933 on the Opernplatz in Berlin, S.A. and Nazi youth groups burned around 25,000 books from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and the Humboldt University; including works by Albert Einstein, Vicki Baum, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Heine, Helen Keller, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, Frank Wedekind, Ernest Hemingway and H.G. Wells. Student groups throughout Germany in 34 towns also carried out their own book burnings on that day and in the following weeks. Erich Kästner wrote an ironic account (published only after the fall of Nazism) of having witnessed the burning of his own books on that occasion. Radio broadcasts of the burnings were played in Berlin and elsewhere, and 40,000 turned up to hear Joseph Goebbels make a speech about the acts. See here for a partial list of authors whose books were burned.

In May 1995, Micha Ullman's underground “Bibliotek” memorial was inaugurated on Bebelplatz square in Berlin, where the Nazi book burnings began. The memorial consists of a window on the surface of the plaza, under which vacant bookshelves are lit and visible. A bronze plaque bears a quote by Heinrich Heine: “Where books are burned in the end people will burn.”

Burnings by authors

In 1588, the exiled English Catholic William Cardinal Allen wrote "An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England", a work sharply attacking Queen Elizabeth I. It was to be published in Spanish-occupied England in the event of the Spanish Armada succeeding in its invasion. Upon the defeat of the Armada, Allen carefully consigned his publication to the fire, and we only know of it through one of Elizabeth's spies, who had stolen a copy.

The Hassidic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov is reported to have written a book which he himself burned in 1808. To this day, his followers mourn "The Burned Book" and seek in their Rabbi's surviving writings for clues as to what the lost volume contained and why it was destroyed.

Carlo Goldoni is known to have burned his first play, a tragedy called Amalasunta, when encountering unfavorable criticism.

Joe Shuster, who together with Jerry Siegel created the fictional superhero Superman, in 1938 burned the first Superman story when under the impression that it would not find a publisher.

Books saved from burning

Symbol of the "New York Society for the Suppression of Vice", advocating book-burning

When Virgil died, he left instructions that his manuscript of the Aeneid was to be burnt, as it was a draft version with uncorrected faults and not a final version for release. However, this instruction was ignored.

Before his death, Franz Kafka wrote to his friend and literary executor Max Brod: "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread." Brod overrode Kafka's wishes, believing that Kafka had given these directions to him, specifically, because Kafka knew he would not honour them – Brod had told him as much. Had Brod carried out Kafka's instructions, virtually the whole of Kafka's work – except for a few short stories published in his lifetime – would have been lost forever. Most critics, at the time and up to the present, justify Brod's decision.

A similar case concerns the noted American poet Emily Dickinson, who died in 1890 and left to her sister Lavinia the instruction of burning all her papers. Lavinia Dickinson did burn almost all of her sister's correspondences, but interpreted the will as not including the forty notebooks and loose sheets, all filled with almost 1800 poems; these Lavinia saved and began to publish the poems that year. Had Lavinia Dickinson been more strict in carrying out her sister's will, all but a small handful of Emily Dickinson's poetic work would have been lost.

At the beginning of the Battle of Monte Cassino in the Second World War, two German officers – Viennese-born Lt.Col. Julius Schlegel (a Roman Catholic), and Captain Maximilian Becker (a Protestant) – had the foresight to transfer the Monte Cassino archives to the Vatican. Otherwise the archives – containing a vast number of documents relating to the 1500-years' history of the Abbey as well as some 1400 irreplaceable manuscript codices, chiefly patristic and historical – would have been destroyed in the Allied air bombing which almost completely destroyed the Abbey shortly afterwards. Also saved by the two officers' prompt action were the collections of the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome which had been sent to the Abbey for safety in December 1942.

In France in the 1940s a group of anti-fascist exiles made a Library of Burned Books of all the books that Hitler had destroyed. This library contained copies of titles that were burned. These book burnings from the Nazi's was an idea to help cleanse German culture of Jewish and foreign influences such as pacifist and decadent literature. The Nazi's were going to make a "museum" of Judaism once the final solution was complete to house certain books that were saved by the Nazis themselves.

Sikh book burning

In the Sikh religion, any copies of their sacred book Guru Granth Sahib which are too badly damaged to be used, and any printer's waste which bears any of its text, are cremated. Such a cremation is called Agan Bhet, and is a similar to that performed when cremating a deceased Sikh.

In literature

• A much-quoted line in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is "manuscripts don't burn" (Template:Lang-ru). "The Master", a major protagonist in the book, is a writer who is plagued by both his own mental problems and the oppression of Stalin's regime in 1930s Moscow. He burns his treasured manuscript in an effort to hide it from the Soviet authorities and cleanse his own mind from the troubles the work has brought him. The character Woland (a mysterious magician who is in fact Satan) later gives the manuscript back to him, saying, "Didn't you know that manuscripts don't burn?" There is an autobiographical element reflected in the Master's character here, as Bulgakov in fact burned an early copy of The Master and Margarita for much the same reasons.
• The first part of Don Quixote has a scene in which the priest and the housekeeper of the eponymous knight go through the chivalry books that have turned him mad. In a kind of auto de fe, they burn most of them. The comments of the priest express the literary tastes of the author, though he offers some sharp criticisms of Cervantes's works as well. It is notable that he saves Tirant lo Blanc.
• At the conclusion of the novel "Auto da Fe" by Nobel-Prize winner Elias Canetti, the bibliophile protagonist immolates himself on a pile of his own library.
• The Japanese novel Toshokan Sensou is about the conflict between two military organizations after the Japanese government passed a law that allows the censorship of any media deemed to be potentially harmful to Japanese society, including book burning.
• The short story "Earth's Holocaust" from Nathaniel Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse, is about a society that burns everything that it finds offensive, including its literature. Special attention is paid to The Bible as the last book burned:

  "Upon the blazing heap of falsehood and worn-out truth--things that the earth had never needed, or had ceased to need, or had grown childishly weary of--fell the ponderous church Bible, the great old volume that had lain so long on the cushion of the pulpit, and whence the pastor's solemn voice had given holy utterance on so many a Sabbath day."

• In Part II of the play Tamburlaine, by Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine (the protagonist) burns a copy of the Qur'an after having conquered Asia Minor and Egypt. His book-burning and declaration of independence from any deity leads to his fatal illness, and subsequently the end of the play.
• In Anne of Green Gables, Anne watches in horror as her caretaker burns her book containing the poem "Lady of Shallot" as punishment for reading instead of doing her chores.
• Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel where books are outlawed and it is the job of a "fireman" to burn them. In the introduction of the 1967 Simon and Schuster book club edition, Bradbury implies that the Nazi book burnings drove him to write the short story "The Fireman" which was the precursor along with the foundation for his novel Fahrenheit 451, stating, "It follows then that when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh."
• At the conclusion of Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose", the unique Medieval library which is at the center of the book's plot is burned and totally destroyed.
• A central event in the fantasy novel Titus Groan is the burning of the library of Earl Sepulchrave, which was the earl's sole pleasure in life - leading to his madness and eventual death.
• Iain Pears's book The Dream of Scipio is set in Provence, with the lives of three people at various historical periods interweaving with each other. Each of these lives includes an incident of book burning with a crucial importance. Manlius Hippomanes, a gallic aristocrat living in the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, makes cynical use of Christianity for personal power and instills religious intolerance and antisemitism in his followers - and after his death, these followers set up a bonfire and burn Hippomanes' entire library of Classical works, believing themselves to be honoring his precepts. Olivier de Noyen, a poet and scholar active in the 14th Century Papal Court at Avignon, had to watch his father burning his beloved copy of Cicero - but then de Noyen re-wrote it from memory, and the incident determined him to devote his life to finding and preserving the books of antiquity. Julien Barneuve, an intellectual active during the Second World War, realizes the disastrous results of his collaboration with the pro-Nazi Vichy government and burns himself to death in a hut - starting the fire by burning his own manuscript of a work praising Hippomanes and condemning de Noyen.
• In the future depicted in Brian Stableford's "The Halcyon Drift", one of the leading planets in the Galaxy is "New Alexandria", whose inhabitants are dedicated to the preservation and extension of knowledge, and are brought up to regard the destruction of books as the most heinous of deeds. Nevertheless, a protagonist agrees to help the Khor-Monsa, an alien species, in destroying books and records of their remote ancestors which were found in a drifting spaceship—since the books contained a shameful secret whose publication might have led to the present Khor-Monsa losing their social status and becoming targets of discrimination.
• In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the euphemistically-called "memory hole" is used to burn any book or written text which is inconvenient to the regime, and there is mention of "the total destruction of all books published before 1960".
• In Journey to the Center of the Earth the protagonist Axel suggests to his uncle, Professor Lindenbrock, that they should do more research on Arne Saknussemm and his works before attempting to duplicate Saknussemm's adventure into the center of the earth. Professor Lindenbrock tells Axel this is, regretfully, out of the question due to the fact that Saknussemm was out of favor with the leaders of his native country, who ordered all his books burned after his death.

Film and television

• BBC Storyville: The Love of Books - A Sarajevo Story - A Sarajevo Story, is the documentary film of how a group of passionate intellectuals, professionals and book lovers risked their lives to save the Gazi Husrav-Beg Library from destruction during the siege of Sarajevo. This is a film about the importance of books, about how libraries are the heart of cultural identity, repositories for history and memory.
• In one episode of The Simpsons, Lisa Simpson sees a bookmobile being driven by Reverend Lovejoy, however the letters behind a tree reveal that it actually reads Book-Burning-Mobile.
• In one episode of Fullmetal Alchemist, in order to prevent Edward from getting information on the Philosopher's Stone, the homunculi burn down one section of the library.
• In the Myst series of computer games and books, the only way to destroy the link to an Age is to destroy its Descriptive Book, usually by burning it.
• In the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones journeys to Berlin in order to retrieve his father's journal, which gives information about finding the Holy Grail. He retrieves it during a Nazi book burning rally (although it was not targeted for burning itself), where it is inadvertently signed by Hitler himself.
• In the Red Dwarf episode "Marooned", Lister burns Rimmer's collection of books to heat Starbug. Rimmer initially protests, saying "A book is a thing of beauty. The voice of freedom, the essence of civilisation." Lister counters, "Biggles Learns To Fly?"
• In the film Pleasantville, the people who are still black-and-white burn all the books in the library to keep people from becoming colored.
• The Crusade episode "The Needs of Earth" depicts a world that has burned its entire cultural heritage — all art, music, and literature — and hunts the person who has the last remaining copies.
• The 2002 film Equilibrium depicts a dystopian society which has eliminated human emotion, and burned all cultural influences that can cause emotion.
• In the 2004 disaster film The Day After Tomorrow, New York City is engulfed by a new Ice Age and characters seek shelter in the New York Public Library. To avoid freezing to death, the main character suggests burning books, much to the horror of two librarians.
• In the Family Guy episode "Not All Dogs Go to Heaven", Meg takes Brian to the church to burn books on science and evolution, citing them as "harmful to God". Among the burnt books are On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking, and a fictional book entitled Logic for First Graders.
• In a key scene of the film "Der alte und der junge König"(The Old and the Young King), a German Historical film made under Nazi rule in 1935, King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia is shown throwing into an open fire the beloved French-language books of his son, Crown Prince Friedrich (the future Friedrich II), as well as the Prince's flute. The film - banned after the fall of the Nazis as a piece of propaganda making manipulative use of history - presents this book burning as a positive and necessary act, which was needed in order to "educate" and "toughen up" the young prince, so as to "prepare him for becoming a great ruler".

See also

• Banned books
• Censorship
• Deletionism
• Destruction of libraries
• Library fires
• List of book-burning incidents
• Marc Drogin
• Maya codices
• Art destruction

External links

• "On Book Burnings and Book Burners: Reflections on the Power (and Powerlessness) of Ideas" by Hans J. Hillerbrand
• "Burning books" by Haig A. Bosmajian
• "Bannings and burnings in history" - Book and Periodical Council (Canada)
• "The books have been burning: timeline" by Daniel Schwartz, CBC News. Updated 10 September 2010