On August 19, 1914, German troops arrived in Louvain, Belgium, whilst on route to France. This small city in Belgium became the base for the German First Army for a week. This was a complete disregard for the Belgian neutrality. The Germans seized the towns weapons and six days later, on the 25th of August, removed the people from their homes and executed them. The troops then proceeded to enter the University of Louvain, the oldest in the country, and filled the library with petrol, setting it alight. With this both the baroque style building and the universities collection of rare manuscripts and texts were destroyed, 200 years of history wiped out in one night.
The events that took place on the night of 25th August 1914 soon reached the international press, which led to worldwide outcry and demonstrations of support in favour of the library. One striking account of this is the Japanese response. Only two days prior had the Japanese announced war on the Germans and this event allowed them a premier to display their outrage. Many cinemas in the country displayed images of the torched library.
Keiser Wilhelm II sent letters to Woodrow Wilson pleading for forgiveness for the act, whilst they felt little dismay for actual acts but rather feared this event may cause the Americans to join the Allies. A similar theme was shown by German intellectuals. Ninety-three prominent German figures, such as the painter Max Liebermann, came together to sign a manifesto denying all accusations of war crimes.
Despite this worldwide outrage, the Germans never learnt their lesson. A similar form of destruction to key cultural devices became a prominent scene in Nazi Germany prior to and during WW2.
On May 10th, 1933, the Nationalist German Student association gathered on Bebelplatz in Berlin. The propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was present along with the SS and Hitler youth groups to name a few. Here they would go on to burn 20,000 books from the Institute for the science of sexuality. Some notable books were Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis; The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels; Ulysses by James Joyce; Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Nabokov’s Lolita and Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Along with these all Marxist literature was banned, the entirety of Sigmund Frued’s work and all of Bertold Becht’s pieces. There were also specific groups who were blacklisted entirely such as Jews, foreigners that offered an anti-Third Reich view of the world, socialists and anarchists.
The books burned during the Nazi regime were done with much more definitive reasoning than the Library of Louvain. The German soldiers who set alight to Louvain claimed it was done in self-defence, although this is much disputed by scholars, whereas the Nazis were not that secretive about their reasonings and were much more targeted. Many of the writers targeted used surrealist methods to help hide their criticisms of modern-day society, such as Kafka who uses the story of Gregor Samsa waking up one day as a cockroach to reflect on the mundane aspects of the pressured society, we live in.
The Nazi’s and the German Student Association took their inspiration from Martin Luther. The first German Student associations book burning took place on the 300th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses, a book which rebutted the Christian values at the time. The book set a new precedent challenging the view that salvation was achieved by financial deeds and instead provided a new view – that salvation was achieved through good deeds.
The events at Louvain led to its own clause in the Treaty of Versailles in Article 247 which states that “Germany undertakes to furnish the University… manuscripts, incunabula, printed books, maps, and objects of collection corresponding in number and value to those destroyed in the burning by Germany of the Library of Louvain.” Efforts were made to restore the library to its previous glory by a mixture of foreign powers and by the mid-1930s the Library was beginning to resemble its former self.
However, on the night of May 16th, 1940, the library was once again destroyed after being specifically targeted by German forces. This reflects on the wider attack of cultural devices which the Nazis instituted in the Second World War.
After rising to power in 1933, the Nazis began the Gleichschaltung. This meant the Nazification of all aspects of German society. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, instituted this by purging the Jewish oeuvre. This led to the blaming of many thoughts and principles as “Jewish doctrines” – which echoes extracts from Mein Kampf where Hitler refers to Marxism as “the Jewish doctrine of Marxism which rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight.”
After erasure of the aspects of culture which the Nazis viewed as an antithesis to their power, they introduced the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Culture Chamber) which focused on merging the Third Reich and all the aspects of German culture in September 1933. In terms of art, Hitler favoured art which focused on classical Greek and Roman milieu (such as Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a bust of Homer). These pieces were said to focus on the elements of the characteristics which promoted the Aryan race.
Joseph Goebbels was put in charge of orchestrating this movement and particularly focused on reaching Hitler’s message to the masses. In August 1933, he led the 10th international radio show in Berlin by declaring that radios were “the eighth great power.” He went forth with the widescale selling of cheap radios known as the Volksempfanger – or in English as the people’s receiver. This was sold at a subsidised price of 76 Reichsmarks and had sold 100,000 copies on the first two days. Historian Eric Rentschler estimates in the New German Critique that in 1941, 65% of German households owned a volksempfanger. Goebbels envisioned these to only be able to tune in to local and Reich approved stations. However, many people had figured out that they could tune into the BBC late at night – although once this was found out it became punishable by death. The radio mixed entertainment and politics to help attract people to listen to the speeches.
Adjacent to this, Goebbels and Hitler also put a particular focus on the musical oeuvre of Nazi Germany. The Nazis embraced the works of popular German composers such as Johann Bach, Beethoven, and Wanger. They fervently opposed the works of the so-called “non-Aryan composers” such as the Jewish Gustav Mahler.
These policies pushed by Goebbels echo the actions of the Germans of the First World War when they burnt down the Louvain Library. They echo the words of Heinrich Heine who said that “where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”