The long viewBook burning in history: a tool of tyrants

Pastor Terry Jones is not the first to resort to book burning. If he went ahead with his Koran burning spectacle, he would be joining a long, if not exactly illustrious, list of people and regimes who took to book burning to advance their religious and political ends.

These ends never — never — included achieving more tolerance, openness, respect, harmony, or freedom. Books were typically burned in order to impose harsh and oppressive political regimes or religious dogmas.

There are dozens and dozens of examples of book burnings, stretching over centuries — from the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the obliteration of the Library of Baghdad, the burning of books and burying of scholars under China’s Qin Dynasty, the destruction of Mayan codices by Spanish conquistadors and priests, and, in more recent times, Nazi book burnings, the burning of communist and “fellow traveler” books in the McCarthy period, and the Taliban destruction of the a precious Kabul book collection.

Here are three instances of book burnings from the second half of the last century:

The Nazi book burning

In 1930s Nazis burned works of Jewish authors and other works considered “un-German” in several public spectacles in different cities in Germany. For example, Richard Euringer, director of the libraries in Essen, identified 18,000 works deemed not to correspond with Nazi ideology, and these books were publicly burned.

On 10 May 1933, on the Opernplatz in Berlin, S.A. and Nazi youth groups burned around 20,000 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 also carried out their own book burnings on that day and in the following weeks.

The McCarthy era

In 1953 U.S Senator Joseph McCarthy recited before his subcommittee and the press a list of supposedly procommunist authors whose works his aide, Roy Cohn, found in the libraries and American cultural centers attached to U.S. embassies abroad. The Eisenhower State Department bowed to McCarthy and ordered its overseas librarians to remove from their shelves “material by any controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers, etc.” Some libraries burned the newly forbidden books. President Dwight D. Eisenhower initially agreed that the State Department should dispose of books advocating communism: “I see no reason for the federal government to be supporting something that advocated its own destruction. That seems to be the acme of silliness.”

A few months later, however, in a speech at Dartmouth College in June 1953, Eisenhower urged Americans concerning libraries: “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book….”

The Taliban and the Nasir-i Khusraw Foundation in Kabul

In 1987 the Nasir-i Khusraw Foundation was established in Kabul, Afghanistan. It was the result of the collaborative efforts of several civil society and academic institutions, leading scholars, and members of the Ismaili community. This site included video and book publishing facilities, a museum, and a library.

The library was noted for its extensive collection of 55,000 books, available to all students and researchers, in the languages of Arabic, English, and Pashto. In addition, its Persian collection was unparalleled — including an extremely rare twelfth-century manuscript of Firdawsi’s epic masterpiece The Book of Kings (Shāhnāma). The Ismaili collection of the library housed works from Hasan-i Sabbah and Nasir-i Khusraw, and the seals of the first Aga Khan.

With the withdrawal of the Soviet forces from Afghanistan in the late 1980s and the strengthening of the Taliban forces, the library collection was relocated to the valley of Kayan.

On 12 August 1998 the Taliban fighters ransacked the press, the museum, the video facilities, and the library, burning some of the books and throwing others in a nearby river. Not a single book was spared, including a 1,000-year-old Quran.

In 1821, Heinrich Heine, in his novel Almansor, wrote: “Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher / Verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen” (“Where books are burned in the end people will burn”).