Why We Remember the Nazi Book Burning
Thomas Doherty
Contra the cliché, you can sometimes judge a book by its cover: The jacket illustration for How Film Became History is a freeze-frame shot from the famous newsreel footage of the Nazi book burnings of May 10, 1933. The image is a good clue to what follows: a study of how the motion picture archives—collected, stitched together, contextualized, and repurposed–shape our memory of the past.
The newsreel footage of the incineration of what the locals called “entartete kunst” (degenerate art) is part of a select inventory of newsreels showing the rise of Nazism in the 1930s that circulated widely in America during the 1930s. Today, of course, the motion picture legacy of the Third Reich is ubiquitous—replayed incessantly in archival documentaries and historical dramas. In the 1930s, however, American exhibitors were loath to give Hitler and the Nazis screen time. For some—particularly Jewish theater managers–the blackout was political; for others it was commercial. Why further depress Depression-era patrons with upsetting news from overseas when all they wanted was a nice night out at the movies? As a result, much of the now-iconic footage from the early days of Nazism was little seen by American audiences in the 1930s. It entered the public imagination only during and after World War II.
The footage of the Nazi book burnings—a made-for-the-newsreels spectacle—was an exception. It was not quite a pseudo-event–it likely would have occurred even had the motion picture cameras not been present—but it was stage-managed for maximum impact on the motion picture screen. The Nazis were proud of the event and wanted the world to watch.
The American newsreel outfits in Germany were notified in advance of the show and given privileged vantage points to set up their equipment and scope out sightlines. “High toward the sky will reach tongues of vicious flame on May 10, 1933, as 62 German institutions of so-called higher education consign to the flames, under Nazi direction, any books which might in the slightest degree be construed as of Jewish origin,” announced Motion Picture Herald, in a preview of the coming attraction.
The Nazis were proud of the event and wanted the world to watch.
In Berlin, the site of the most elaborately choreographed pageantry, the bonfire took place at the Opera Square, between the Opera House and the University of Berlin. A crowd of 40,000 celebrants braved a light drizzle and sang “The Nation to Arms” and “The Horst Wessel Song” by way of a choral soundtrack. Brownshirts and undergraduates had ransacked libraries and bookstores for kindling, gathering an estimated 20,000 books to toss into the fire.
The festivities proper got under way around midnight. Frederick T. Birchall, the New York Times correspondent on the scene, watched as “a funeral pyre of crossed logs, some twelve feet square and five feet high” was set aflame by students who tossed lit torches into the center to ignite a roaring fire.
The works of Jewish authors provided most of the fuel for the fire, books by such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Emil Ludwig (Ludwig later said he was proud to be included among such illustrious company and glad for the publicity). Not that Protestant and Catholic authors deemed toxic to Nazi ideology were neglected: The fires consumed works by both Mann brothers, Thomas and Heinrich, and Eric Maria Remarque, who was targeted for “degrading the highest patriotic ideals” of the German military in his antiwar classic All Quiet on the Western Front. Americans were represented by Helen Keller, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, and Sinclair Lewis.
After the students had exercised their throwing arms, the Nazi propaganda minister, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, took to the rostrum to deliver a speech on “the symbolic significance” of the pyromania. “The epoch of morbid Jewish intellectualism is terminated!” he bellowed.
The works of Jewish authors provided most of the fuel for the fire…
The dramatic footage reached newsreel houses in New York on the weekend of May 26–28, 1933, and thereafter filtered down to neighborhood theaters nationwide. “It’s a big night for the younger Hitler set!” enthused the narrator for Hearst Metrotone News, which treated the event as a fraternity prank. “The college boys are making Berlin safe for Nazis by burning books that might lead Germans astray!” The editors at Fox Movietone News also took a lighthearted approach, playing the jaunty tune “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” over the coverage.
By most accounts, however, contemporary audiences understood that the bonfire was no laughing matter. Most watched in grim silence; some hissed. At Radio City Music Hall, a reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle heard an outburst of communal disgust as patrons “join[ed] in hissing the newsreel views of the Nazis burning banned books.” The syndicated commentator Walter Winchell feared that only “the blood and the tears of men” would ultimately douse the flames. Time magazine called the spectacle a “Bibliocaust.”
Throughout the 1930s, the footage had a persistent afterlife in news-on-screen formats. It was rewound regularly in year-end surveys of the news and in the March of Time screen magazine (1935–1951). Paramount Newsreel numbered the book burning footage as one of its most important “scoops” of the decade.
Seeking to avoid controversy and leery of trouble with the German marketplace, Hollywood feature films were slower to exploit the footage. However, two obscure independent productions incorporated a goodly portion of the newsreel footage: Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.’s Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934), a semidocumentary account of his sojourn in Nazi Germany in 1933, and I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1936), a docu-drama about Isobel Lillian Steele’s imprisonment by the Gestapo on charges of espionage in 1934. Both Vanderbilt and Steele claimed to be at the bonfire, close enough to feel the heat. “No such acts of barbaric vandalism have been recorded in modern history,” said Edwin C. Hill, who narrated the Vanderbilt film, as the footage unspooled.
The sheer cinematic power of the footage remains hypnotic, as if the mise-en-scéne were composed and lit by studio professionals…
When Hollywood finally conjured the book burning, it was by way of allegory. In the Warner Bros. biopic The Life of Emile Zola (1937), the Nazi book burning is evoked when a French mob burns copies of Zola’s pamphlet J’ accuse, his defense of the Jewish French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, unjustly convicted of treason by an antisemitic high command. The Production Code Administration was concerned enough about the connect-the-dots aspects of the bonfire imagery that it cautioned Warner Bros. not to mimic the newsreel footage too closely.
Not until the eve of World War II did Hollywood venture to mount a direct depiction. In The Mortal Storm (1940), MGM’s entry into the prewar anti-Nazi cycle of 1939–1941, the director Frank Borzage orchestrated a backlot reenactment for what the fan magazine Modern Screen called “Hollywood first presentation of the most loathsome incident in modern history.” MGM prop men bought up 2,000 copies of old novels from secondhand bookstores and then set the literature aflame for a good cause.
Wartime documentaries reviewing the rise of Nazi Germany, notably the first entry in Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, Prelude to War (1942), found the book-burning footage both instructive and irresistible. By the end of WWII, the newsreels of the night of May 10, 1933, came as close to saturation penetration as any motion pictures taken in Nazi Germany.
The imagery has been imprinted in our motion picture memory ever since. The sheer cinematic power of the footage remains hypnotic, as if the mise-en-scéne were composed and lit by studio professionals: the night-for-night photography, illuminated by the fire, with the brownshirts and undergraduates silhouetted against the flames. Even at the time, the bonfire was seen as a metaphor for all the darkest impulses of Nazism. Looking back, it also seems a foreshadowing of the conflagrations to come.
Thomas Doherty is professor of American studies at Brandeis University and the author of How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America.
