The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance - Softcover

Rydell, Anders

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0735221235 ISBN 13: 9780735221239

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

"A chilling reminder of Hitler’s twisted power." —BBC

For readers of The Monuments Men and The Hare with Amber Eyes, the story of the Nazis' systematic pillaging of Europe's libraries, and the small team of heroic librarians now working to return the stolen books to their rightful owners.

While the Nazi party was being condemned by much of the world for burning books, they were already hard at work perpetrating an even greater literary crime. Through extensive new research that included records saved by the Monuments Men themselves—Anders Rydell tells the untold story of Nazi book theft, as he himself joins the effort to return the stolen books. When the Nazi soldiers ransacked Europe’s libraries and bookshops, large and small, the books they stole were not burned. Instead, the Nazis began to compile a library of their own that they could use to wage an intellectual war on literature and history. In this secret war, the libraries of Jews, Communists, Liberal politicians, LGBT activists, Catholics, Freemasons, and many other opposition groups were appropriated for Nazi research, and used as an intellectual weapon against their owners. But when the war was over, most of the books were never returned. Instead many found their way into the public library system, where they remain to this day.

Now, Rydell finds himself entrusted with one of these stolen volumes, setting out to return it to its rightful owner. It was passed to him by the small team of heroic librarians who have begun the monumental task of combing through Berlin’s public libraries to identify the looted books and reunite them with the families of their original owners. For those who lost relatives in the Holocaust, these books are often the only remaining possession of their relatives they have ever held. And as Rydell travels to return the volume he was given, he shows just how much a single book can mean to those who own it.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anders Rydell is a journalist, editor, and author of nonfiction. As the Head of Culture at a major Swedish media group, Rydell directs the coverage of arts and culture in 14 newspapers. His two books on the Nazis, The Book Theives and The Looters, have been translated into 16 languages. The Book Thieves is his first work published in English.
 
Henning Koch was born in Sweden but has spent most of his life in England, Spain, and Sardinia. Most recently he translated A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. He has also written a short story collection, Love Doesn't Work, and a novel, The Maggot People.

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For readers of The Monuments Men and The Hare with Amber Eyes, the story of the Nazis' systematic pillaging of Europe's libraries, and the small team of heroic librarians now working to return the stolen books to their rightful owners.

While the Nazi party was being condemned by much of the world for burning books, they were already hard at work perpetrating an even greater literary crime. Through extensive new research that included records saved by the Monuments Men themselves-Anders Rydell tells the untold story of Nazi book theft, as he himself joins the effort to return the stolen books. When the Nazi soldiers ransacked Europe's libraries and bookshops, large and small, the books they stole were not burned. Instead, the Nazis began to compile a library of their own that they could use to wage an intellectual war on literature and history. In this secret war, the libraries of Jews, Communists, Liberal politicians, LGBT activists, Catholics, Freemasons, and many other opposition groups were appropriated for Nazi research, and used as an intellectual weapon against their owners. But when the war was over, most of the books were never returned. Instead many found their way into the public library system, where they remain to this day.

Now, Rydell finds himself entrusted with one of these stolen volumes, setting out to return it to its rightful owner. It was passed to him by the small team of heroic librarians who have begun the monumental task of combing through Berlin's public libraries to identify the looted books and reunite them with the families of their original owners. For those who lost relatives in the Holocaust, these books are often the only remaining possession of their relatives they have ever held. And as Rydell travels to return the volume he was given, he shows just how much a single book can mean to those who own it.

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1. A Fire That Consumes the World

Berlin

"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned too." -Heinrich Heine, 1820

These words are engraved on a rusty red metal plate sunk into the cobblestones of Bebelplatz in Berlin. Berlin's summer tourists wander past the square, situated between Brandenburger Tor and Museumsinsel, on their way to see one of the city's more grandiose sights. The location still holds symbolic tension. In one corner of the square stands an elderly woman with tousled white hair. She has wrapped herself in a big Israeli flag-the Star of David across her back. Another war has broken out in Gaza. Some thirty people have gathered to demonstrate against the anti-Semitic sentiments that, seventy years after the Second World War, are once more reawakening in Europe.

On the other side of the broad, fashionable thoroughfare of Unter den Linden, trestle tables have been put out in front of the gates of Humboldt University. For a few euros one can buy well-thumbed copies of books by Thomas Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, and Stefan Zweig-all authors whose works were thrown into the fire here in May 1933. In front of the tables is a row of cobblestone-size metal plates. Each plate bears a name: Max Bayer, Marion Beutler, Alice Victoria Berta, all of whom once studied at the university. After each name is a date, with a place-name that needs no further explanation: "Mauthausen 1941," "Auschwitz 1942," "Theresienstadt 1945."

Heinrich Heine's words, actually a line of dialogue from the play Almansor, have since the Second World War been seen as an insightful prophecy of what came to pass here, and the catastrophe that would follow. On May 10, 1933, in Bebelplatz, which at that time was known as Opernplatz, history's most famous ceremony of book burning was staged-an event that has remained a powerful symbol of totalitarian oppression, cultural barbarism, and the merciless ideological war waged by the Nazis. The flames of the book-burning pyre have also come to symbolize the intimate connection between cultural destruction and the Holocaust.

Earlier that same spring, the Nazis had assumed power in Germany using another fire-the Reichstag fire in February 1933-as a pretext. The Nazis claimed it was the work of Communists and that Germany was threatened by a "Bolshevik plot," and set in motion the first extensive wave of terror, arresting Communists, Social Democrats, Jews, and others in political opposition. These accusations were fueled by the Nazi Party newspaper, the Všlkischer Beobachter, which had been stirring and agitating for years against Jewish, Bolshevik, pacifist, and cosmopolitan literature, setting the stage for the Nazis' ascendance.

The Nazis had been sabotaging cultural events since before 1933-everything from "displeasing" film screenings to exhibitions of so-called degenerate art came under attack. In October 1930, Thomas Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize the previous year, attacked the prevailing mood in an open reading held at the Beethoven Hall in Berlin. Joseph Goebbels, tipped off about what was in the offing, had sent twenty Brownshirts from the party's SA storm troops to the reading, all in black tie to blend in with the audience, a group that included some right-wing intellectuals. Mann's speech was met with applause from some sections of the audience, and heckling from the saboteurs. Eventually the atmosphere grew so inflamed that Mann was forced to leave the premises by the back entrance.

Threats were even more widespread. The Mann family and writers such as Arnold Zweig and Theodor Plievier had been receiving a constant stream of threatening telephone calls and letters. The homes of writers were vandalized with graffiti. And selected writers were subjected to individual monitoring by SA patrols that waited outside their houses and followed them wherever they went.

Lists of objectionable literature were produced. In August 1932, the Všlkischer Beobachter published a blacklist of writers who should be banned once the party assumed power. Early that same year, a declaration had been published in the same newspaper, supported by the signatures of forty-two German professors, demanding that German literature should be protected against "cultural Bolshevism." In the winter of 1933, when the Nazis took power, the focus attack against objectionable literature shifted away from the street and into the machinery of state. In February 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg signed a law "for the protection of people and state," which imposed restrictions on printed publications-further amendments in the spring of the same year imposed more controls on freedom of expression. The first casualties were Communist and Social Democrat newspapers and publishers. Hermann Gšring was charged with leading the battle against so-called dirty literature: Marxist, Jewish, and pornographic books.

It was this attack on literature that led up to the book burnings in May-but in fact the initiative did not come from the Nazi Party, but rather from the Deutsche Studentenschaft-an umbrella organization of German student federations. Several of these student federations had more or less openly been supporting the Nazis since the 1920s. It was not the first time in the interwar period that German right-wing conservative students had made book pyres. In 1922 hundreds of students gathered at the Tempelhof airfield in Berlin to burn "dirty literature," and in 1920 students in Hamburg burned a copy of the Treaty of Versailles, the terms of surrender that Germany had been forced to sign after the First World War.

The Nazi Party's attack on literature fed into attacks already being carried out by groups of conservative, right-wing students. For these student groups, book burnings were a German tradition of defiance and resistance going back to the days of Martin Luther and the Reformation. In April 1933 the Deutsche Studentenschaft announced an action against "un-German literature," casting Adolf Hitler as a new Luther. To evoke the Ninety-five Theses with which Luther began the Reformation, the student federation published its own "theses" in the Všlkischer Beobachter-twelve theses "Wider den undeutschen Geist!" (Against the un-German Spirit).

The students argued that language held the true soul of a people and that German literature for this reason had to be "purified" and liberated from foreign influence. They stated that the Jew was the worst enemy of the German language: "A Jew can only think in a Jewish way. If he writes in German he is lying. The German who writes in German but thinks in an un-German way is a traitor." The students demanded that all "Jewish literature" should be published in Hebrew and "the un-German spirit eradicated from public libraries." German universities, according to the students, should be "strongholds for the traditions of the German people."

Their proclamation was the beginning of a national action to clean out "un-German" literature. Student associations subordinated to Deutsche Studentenschaft at German universities and formed "war committees" to organize coordinated book burnings all over Germany. The book burnings were to be manifested as celebratory events, and the committees were exhorted to market their events, sign up speakers, collect wood for the fires, and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0735221235
• ISBN 13: 9780735221239
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Terminal Video; n.pederzini@terminaldistribuzione.com; ; Via Bruno Buozzi, 24/26,; Granarolo dell'Emilia BO,; Italien