Kristallnacht Community Commemoration Focuses on Nazi Book Burnings

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(Ann Millin lights a yahrzeit candle at the beginning of the Community Kristallnacht Commemoration.)

The increasing frequency of book bans in American public schools may remind some of the book burnings in Germany that served as a precursor to Kristallnacht.

This year’s Community Kristallnacht Commemoration — hosted by the Baltimore Jewish Council and Baltimore Hebrew Congregation on Nov. 9 — centered not on the titular “night of broken glass” that saw German Jewish businesses attacked and business owners assaulted, but on the 1933 book burnings, how they led to Kristallnacht and what can be learned from this history in 2023.

According to PEN America, a century-old nonprofit organization focused on literacy and freedom of speech in the written word, “wholesale bans” have removed entire collections of books from classrooms and school libraries. While in the past, book bans have focused on individual titles, these blanket bans strip schools of their books and require them to undergo a lengthy approval process to be reinstated in the classroom. Overwhelmingly, books that tackle race and LGBTQ-related issues are subject to bans, with many of the parents leading the movement to ban these books not even reading the titles they are advocating against.

Ann Millin, a retired former historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the speaker at the community commemoration, said that these efforts to remove books from circulation based on their content is a precursor to dangerous censorship and potentially even book burnings. Millin, who once studied under Elie Wiesel, spoke of the history behind book burnings and the experiences of Jewish authors in Nazi Germany.

Millin started the event by acknowledging the tragedy of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and by speaking of the resiliency of the Jewish people in the face of the attack, the book burnings and Kristallnacht.

“In the face of atrocities, we are wordless,” Millin said. “But we must, nevertheless, speak, though we know no words can encompass the reality of what we have witnessed this past month and felt in our hearts and souls.”

Millin relayed the story of a distant relative of her nephew-in-law’s, German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, whom Hitler considered his No. 1 enemy prior to his rise to power. One of his most major works, “The Oppermanns,” was written and published in 1933, the same year the Nazis came to power, and presented a satire of a German family living under Nazism.

Many of his works were destroyed in the 1933 book burnings. By Kristallnacht, Feuchtwanger had already escaped to France, but his German apartment was broken into that night and his remaining manuscripts were burned.

Millin noted that when discussing Kristallnacht, it is important to also acknowledge the events that led up to it.

“The violence of Kristallnacht seemed to much of the world to be the resurgence of medieval Jew hatred bursting forth from nothing,” she said. “But to think this way about these events would render them ahistorical and mythical, out of time and out of place. As a historian, I can’t do that.”

The 1933 book burnings were not even the first of their kind in Germany, as they were preceded by a similar event in 1817. To celebrate the 300th anniversary of Martin Luther publishing his 95 Theses, nationalist students burned radical and anti-national texts.

“In virtually every instance of book burning, it represents an attempt at censorship that stems from a political or religious opposition to the ideas in question,” Millin said. “It’s an attempt to suppress thought and action.”

She noted that in the case of the 1933 book burnings, the Nazis did not see themselves as destroying culture. Instead, they believed that they were advancing Aryan culture by disposing of works that rejected it. Jewish texts, “degenerate” art and research on LGBTQ individuals were all destroyed in the fire.

The book burnings were received incredibly poorly by people around the world, with American and British press particularly appalled and dedicating several weeks to covering the book burnings and their aftermath. Even the former Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had been living in exile in the Netherlands, said that he “never thought he would be ashamed to be a German.”

Still, nothing came about of this backlash, which made room for Kristallnacht to happen five years later.

Millin ended her presentation with a plea to the audience to stop the current attacks on books, likening censorship of books and education to fascism and stating that everyone has an active duty as citizens to contribute to democracy.

“We have to stop the attack on books before it ever gets to burning them,” she said. “The editing of libraries going on right now is extremely dangerous, because it’s only one step away from taking the books and destroying them.”

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