Germany Heaps Its Classics on the Pyre; Nazis Destroying Treasure, Say N. Y. Critics

Besides the tremendous conflagration planned for non-Aryan and Marxist books on May 10, “pillars of shame” are to be erected on May 3 in front of Germany’s sixty-two institutions of higher learning. To these will be nailed all “un-German” publications of professors and others who supposedly have participated in “anti-German” activities.

On May 10, thousands of books proscribed by the Nazis will feed the flames out of which the so-called pure German culture will arise. Every private library as well as those in institutions will be ransacked and offered on the pyre.

It will not be easy for the German students to find room on the “pillars of shame” for all the books on the Nazi index expurgatorius. The zeal manifested by these students have led them to include Upton Sinclair’s “Brass Check” and Helen Keller’s “How I Became a Socialist”, along with the works of Sholom Asch, Henri Barbusse, Alfred Doeblin, Ilya Ehrenburg, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jaraslov Hasek, Heinrch Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Arthur Schnitzler, Arnold Zweig, Stefan Zweig, Jacob Wassermann, August Bebel, Edouard Bernstein, Thomas Mann’s “Essays on the German Republic, 1923” and “German Lectures 1930” and numerous other works.

Representative American literary persons in New York were asked for their reaction to the proposed burning of all alien and non-Aryan #ooks in Germany. They replied, as follows:

Carl Van Doren, head of the Literary Guild, author and critic: “If they burn all the non-Aryan books written in Germany since the war on May 10 they will destroy practically all of German literature that can be read with any degree of understanding outside of Germany.

“The Germans have been used to writing solely for themselves and therefore their literature has meant nothing to anyone else. German literature since the World War, as represented by Wassermann, Feuchtwanger and the Zweigs, has had meaning for the entire world.”

Lewis Gannett, literary critic of the Herald-Tribune: “If there were liars peddling German atrocity stories abroad they could never catch up with the barbaric inventiveness of the Hitlerites themselves. I cannot imagine it occurring to a Jew that Germans would ever burn books; learning and poetry are traditionally too precious to the Jews. It is, of course, only another evidence that Germany is in the hands of uncivilized animals.

“Book burners cannot touch the work of Heine or of Einstein or even a Hesse, a Zweig, or a Feuchtwanger. They do most hurt to themselves and to Germany—once a torch-bearer of civilization.”

Harry Hansen, literary critic for the World-Telegram and himself a translator from the German: “The German proposal runs into difficulties at once when we consider the books of the Bible. These cannot possibly be prohibited nor do I see how they can be ventilated according to a Hitlerian dispensation. It would also be edifying to discover what would happen to writings by Jews which do not reflect a Semitic point of view, but merely interpret German life and thought because the author happened to be saturated with it. How much of Heine is Semitic and how much is ‘echt-Deutsch’ can hardly be decided by a government protocol.

“There seems to be a feeling that if Germany were deprived of all non-Aryan books and learning it would stifle in a cultural vacuum. This is an error. We must not forget that folklore, for instance, has no relation to a high state of culture taken over from elsewhere. The mental resourcefulness of the Aryan-German would evolve something important, possibly even a contribution to world culture. But my belief is that it is impossible. No nation set down in the middle of Europe can build barriers against ideas from without in these days.”

Joseph Wood Krutch, author of “Art and Experience” and dramatic critic for The Nation: “It is not easy to say anything about a proposal so preposterous as that of the Nazis to destroy all non-Aryan books. I suppose the Catholic Church and the Communist party are the most intolerant groups to have exercised great power during the last thousand years but the Catholics never proposed to destroy every non-Christian book and the Communists never proposed to destroy every non-Marxian one. For a parallel one must go back to the words attributed to the general who ordered the destruction of the library at Alexandria: ‘If these books agree with the Koran they are unnecessary; if they disagree, they are evil’.”