Book Burning
There was talk of a book burning on the Opera Platz. I had to see it. I even wondered if such a thing could be possible or if it was just one more rumor. In spite of the promise of a rainy evening, gathering crowds dawdled and drifted restlessly along the avenues.
I found an outdoor table at the Café Steiner across from the Opera. I felt a thrill of anticipation in the air, an urgency. Unter den Linden was humming.
I should mention I had a cubicle at the American Embassy. I was overjoyed to be in this exciting city, to have this job typing and filing. I’d arranged my desk with my rainbow paperclips, my lucky coffee cup, my photo of me and my parents in our backyard back in Thorne River. My German wasn’t too bad.
I ordered a glass of golden Riesling. I had my girlfriend Tyler’s book with me. Gynecaeum. We’d been roommates and best friends at the all-girls college in New England where we both graduated, class of 1930. Tyler had married a potentate off in a distant country.
I opened it to where I’d left off. The book was all about Tyler’s breakup from her husband, ruler of a very small domain. It was a heartwarming chapter, how Tyler and her women had worked for the relief of refugee mothers and children coming from countries on their borders. Other chapters were about her spouse’s pack of wrangling wives and how they made Tyler’s life a hell. The book had a pretty cover, though, a veiled houri pouring coffee from a graceful silver pot.
A light rain fell. The waiter came out with a long metal cane and unrolled the café awning to shelter the outdoor patrons. The dampening canvas overhead shed a musty smell, like fermenting meadow grass.
Commotion grew in the streets, as students gathered in the Kaiser Franz-Josef Platz in front of Berlin University. Police barricaded the area, blocking traffic.
At around seven a fleet of vans came through, loaded with loudspeakers, photographic equipment, and Jupiter lamps, what we’d call ‘klieg lights.’ Camera crews set up and the press corps walked around, studying vantage points, excitedly talking.
“What’s happening?” I asked the waiter, just to see what he’d say. He was a lanky, likeable beanpole with a cabaret comic’s grin and gum-slicked red hair.
“Spring break. Those student vacation rallies.” He picked up my glass. “Another Riesling?”
“Yes!”
A work team knocked together a platform and a podium. Men draped it with bunting. Long swastika banners blew all around us on high scaffolds. White, red, and black, the hakenkreuz, the hooked cross with the running feet. Workmen set up loudspeakers around the podium near the Opera. I had a ringside seat.
Crowds collected. People flocked to the front steps of the Dresden Bank and St. Hedwig’s Church, behind the Opera. They clustered in the windows of the Opera itself and on the balcony. They assembled in the University buildings and by nine o’clock they were a pretty solid mass. Throngs mobbed Unter den Linden all the way to the Brandenburg Gate. The polizei threw up barriers. Guards kept belligerent order with rubber truncheons. A pushcart peddler did a brisk trade selling mirrors fixed to long sticks, what they called ‘trench-mirrors.’ They were periscopes! For spectators jammed in the back rows.
The next trucks arrived loaded with books. Uniformed SS scooped them off with shovels.
A truckdriver in a tweed cap and long canvas work coat jumped out. He walked over, taking a seat near my table. He stretched and grunted, ordered a tankard, downed it and ordered another. He wiped his mustache with the back of a hand and looked my way. Here was my chance to pick up more scuttlebutt.
“Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“The school brotherhoods.” His voice was thick as wet dog fur. “Burning the books tonight. Blacklist rubbish. Communist junk. They got their orders through the school prefects. Even the teachers are joining in.”
I closed Tyler’s Gynecaeum and slid it under my purse. I didn’t want it seized by an enthusiast. “Is it some kind of joke?”
“No joke!” He gave me a stern, reproving once-over. “Somebody’s got to do it. It’s not only schools. We’re getting trash from every library in the city. Public, private collectors, homes.”
“Homes? Whose homes?”
“We got a good carload from an old geezer. A doctor who collected—“ he lowered his voice and half covered his mouth with a big strong hand, “sex books.” He spat on the sidewalk, then picked up his beer. “We just finished pulling down his shelves. We sacked the place. This load will burn good, it’s hot stuff. They took him to headquarters for his own personal examination.” He chortled. “On the house.”
I put money on the table for my wine. Maybe I should get out of here before the going got rough. But I couldn’t tear away from anything so sensationally ghastly. It was like a scary movie. Wouldn’t Tyler want to hear the details?
The driver in the tweed cap called the waiter for another brew, then leaned toward me and bared his teeth in a ghoulish snicker. “Dr. Goebbels is behind the whole operation. “Over there, see the sign?”
An enormous placard on the side of the open truck read: Burn Bad Books.
“That’s from the Sex Research Institute. If you can believe such a thing.”
I started to get nervous about being stampeded, the way I was when they burned the Reichstag. I’d be trapped in a fiery crowd scene. I got up to leave.
“Where you off to?” asked my friend. “You’ll miss the best part.”
I sat.
On mounds of sand in the middle of Kaiser Franz-Josef Platz, boys stacked timber in a huge woodpile, neatly squared like a log house. Schoolboys in short pants scrambled to help, their bare legs knobby and vulnerable, their caps and neckties sporting school colors, purple, green and blue. Angelic little boys, to their mothers.
Teenagers in white open-collar shirts and knickers carried placards. Burn the Poisoners! The signs weren’t sloppily scrawled in a hurry, but beautifully hand-printed, some in red and black Gothic letters. The kids had planned the event well. They had lovingly put in school time.
“Nice billboards,” I said to my truckdriver buddy.
“The youth leagues have worked hard on this. They’re fine sturdy boys.” He stood, and belched. “Got to get back to business.” He limped off to his truck.
Suddenly, all the floodlights went on, magnified by giant reflectors. They threw a day-bright glare over the scene. Camera crews furiously cranked.
A professor in cap and gown climbed to the podium and shouted, “On this night all over our country, from Bremen to Frankfort, from Hamburg to Bonn and Dresden, loyal students will incinerate the dead past!”
He raved about cutting chains, freeing the soul, about heretics at the stake. His robes flapped out like batwings. He wound up his long diatribe. “Authors of corruption,” he bellowed. “Twenty thousand of you will blaze to the skies! I give you to the pyre to burn for your crimes!”
The crowd thundered, the pandemonium bouncing off the stone buildings. “Down with decadence!”
Then came the torchlight parades that everyone so cherished. Students yelling and brandishing flares marched on Kaiser Franz-Josef Platz from three directions, streaming down from the Brandenburg Gate, the Luisenstrasse and the Karlstrasse. They weren’t only students, but happy hellraisers of every age.
My ears ached and rang with the deafening roar, but I was stuck, riveted, unable to move from my seat.
The torchbearers strutted in formation, the leaders barking orders from “March!” to “Halt!” back to “Forward March!” They were going nowhere but in squares. Toward midnight, they formed an honor guard flanking the woodpile. Helpers poured on cans of kerosene. The marchers threw in their torches. Though light rain still fell, the flames swooped up with an explosive gulp of air.
Kids were howling ecstatically, boyish voices cracking with joy. They marched, they broke ranks, they jumped around the pyre. Hitler kids under the spell of fire. “Flamme empor!” Up in flames!
Clattering over the cobblestones, book trucks kept coming in convoys. Books were rushed into the blaze. Sweating newsreel cameramen shot footage as if they were at the battle front. Clumps of burning wood and dead books shot out. People shrieked and fell back. Gloved flunkeys darted forward to throw the fiery pieces back in. When the book trucks couldn’t get close, in case they ignited their fuel tanks, the burners made a human chain, passing the books along to throw in the blaze.
Firetrucks were parked near the police cars. Every brigade in Berlin was here, just as they’d been for the Reichstag burning nearly three months ago. Tonight’s firemen weren’t working, though. They leaned on their trucks, chatting, admiring the fireworks, no man making a move. They probably wouldn’t bother with hoses unless the blaze spread to the Dresden Bank.
I felt myself shivering in outbreaks of jitters. Ant-like sparks sprinted along my nerves and muscles. I breathed fumes of burning paper. My eyes were splotched with tears from wood smoke. I closed my eyes and saw flames. Somebody grabbed me, and I jumped.
“What are you doing here, Jane?”
I whipped around. It was Roger Pierce, a co-worker from the Embassy. Roger’s large strong fingers dug firmly into my shoulder. He let go, grabbed a chair and dragged it to my table. He sat and leaned close, reeking of smoke and kerosene. His shirtsleeves were rolled up. His shirt and pants were covered with soot, his face was smudged and his glasses smeared with ashes. He took them off and cleaned them on a handkerchief he had in his pocket.
“Are you here helping out?” His blue-lipped smile thin and insinuating. His face was very close. “Burning books that should never have been written?”
“Of course not. It’s all a bit insane.”
His expression changed, his eyes narrowing. He pulled away. “I see. You are one of the dissenters.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Dissent was a dangerous word around here.
He cocked his head back. “I’ve long suspected you, Jane. You are going to make trouble for yourself if you don’t straighten out. I advise you to join in. You don’t want to be seen as a killjoy. You, above all, do not want to be seen as a critic of the government.”
“Join in what? This?” Roger Pierce looked possessed, his nostrils twitching, but his hard eyes showed him perfectly in control.
He got up and walked a distance until he reached the nearest truck. He heaved off an armload of books, and tossed it into the fire. Then he picked up another stack and came back to my table. He handed me the books. “Let me see you do the right thing.” The soot on his face and arms was spotted with rain.
I gaped at him. I didn’t take the books from him. He was serious. “I don’t feel like it. It’s too crazy.”
“No,” he said. “It is not crazy. I am demonstrating for you what you ought to be doing. This is a time for you to show what you are made of, Jane. I’d like to see you act correctly and stand up for the right, Jane. Show me that you’re not aligned with hostile aliens bent on undermining this government.”
He slammed the books on the tinny café table, rattling it. “This is a way you can show your support. Go ahead. Move. Do it.”
I got up from the table. “You go ahead, Roger, if that’s what you want. I’m not staying.” The heat and stench were coming unbearably close. Fuel, smoke, wood ash and the acrid fumes of burned glue and paper clogged my throat and lungs.
Roger saw the book under my arm. “You have something to contribute?”
“I have to go,” I said, clutching Gynecaeum as if I had a personal mission to preserve Tyler’s written word, to save her from the pyre.
The bonfire blasted hotter than a furnace, flaring ten meters high, higher, throwing yellow gleams on the mirroring windows of the State Opera and university buildings. Strong flames flashed up into the black sky, beating against our faces and bodies, bathing us in fantastic light.
“I’m getting out,” I screamed. “I don’t want to burn up.”
Roger Pierce caught me in his grasp to prevent my escape. “Don’t you want to hear Dr. Goebbels? He’s an outstanding speaker.”
I got a glimpse of a ranting figure etched against the flames. Arms flung wide, he seemed to be burning alive. What was it about these bonfire orations? Some folks couldn’t get enough of them.
“Stay,” Roger ordered. “I advise you not to miss this! Or it’s going to mean a rough road for you, Jane.”
“Let me alone!” I yanked free of him. The heat was making me sick. The rage of the night was wrecking me. I was coughing and filthy. My lungs felt like seared black sponges. I edged toward the police barricade, but Roger got in my way and blocked me.
I felt heat in my ear, and my hair was crackling, I clapped my hand to my head, my hand pressing out the glowing ashes. He finally let go of me.
“With a smile, he wrenched Tyler’s book from under my arm. He looked at it. “Gynecaeum. This surely must be committed to the flames.”
“No. No. She’s my friend.”
“Not a good friend, Jane. He heaved it efficiently into the flames with the muscular grace of a discus thrower.
“How could you?” I burst into tears. Too late. There was no question of grabbing it back. The heat was furious, killing. People were backing off. I turned and ran, fleeing from flames so savage they seemed alive, grinning and sinewy.
Embers fluttered around my head. I brushed away flying pages that darted glowing from the bonfire like spiteful night-moths. I pushed, struggling to break through the crowd, but my way was barred and blocked. The mob’s cheers mounted as somebody new climbed to the rostrum. I fought to get my footing, getting kicked and elbowed.
I squeezed through the bulked bodies until I reached the police ring. I clapped my hands to my head to press out the sparks. When I was sure I wouldn’t ignite, I ran in the wind, all the way home to Acacia Street. I didn’t want a trolley or an underground.
I burst into my room, my eyelids scorched and my eyes stinging. Fumes saturated my skin, hair, and clothes. I washed my smoky underwear in the sink, pouring eau de cologne in the rinse water. With scissors, I trimmed singed bits of my hair. I bathed and shampooed, and even then I smelled smoke.
The next day, I hunkered down in my cubicle. The newspapers were full of the story. One of the official dailies for May 11, 1933 called last night’s event an astonishing auto-da-fé, a theatrical spectacle, an ultimate campaign against bad books.
I picked up another paper and read.
“Students at it again with their seasonal pranks… carnivalesque… a sophomoric heyday. Twenty-thousand volumes burned, destroying the depravities of Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Jack London…” Oh, they’re burning Jack London? I began compulsively rearranging my paper clips, coffee cup, photos of home.
© Marcelle Thiébaux
Marcelle Thiébaux has published stories in DASH Literary Journal, The MacGuffin, Avalon Literary Review, Blood: Tales of Fantasy and Murder, The Delmarva Review, The Griffin, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Louisiana Literature, Urban Fantasy, Visitant, and Vol.1 Brooklyn, among others.
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