Although the term ‘genocide’ – used to refer to the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group – it has only been part of common parlance since 1944. One year before the end of the Second World War, lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide as a hybrid combination of the Ancient Greek word γένος (génos) meaning ‘race or people’ and the Latin caedere, ‘to kill’.
He was at that time describing the murderous Nazi policies in the occupied territories, in his book ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe’. The term would later be utilised by the United Nations when defining the crime of genocide under international law in the Genocide Convention, ensuring its adoption by the international community in preference to terms in other languages that predated Lemkin’s neologism – including the German term Völkermord ( ’murder of a people’) and the Polish ludobójstwo (‘killing of a people or nation’).
Less known is Lemkin’s use of the term, Cultural Genocide, to refer to the eradication and destruction of cultural artifacts, such as books, artworks, monuments, and structures. Cultural genocide may also involve forced assimilation, as well as the suppression of a language or cultural activities that do not conform to the destroyer’s notion of what is appropriate.
Among the Nazi crimes, for example, against the Polish nation was a campaign of cultural genocide that included the burning of millions of books, resulting in the destruction of an estimated 80% of all school libraries, and three-quarters of all scientific libraries in the country.
The removal of heritage and eradication of identity are at the heart of the concept of Lemkin’s proposed understanding of ‘cultural genocide’. And while this may not involve the physical eradication of a people, it is through the suppression of identity and cultural heritage that the individual and their character is also destroyed. In the case of National Socialism, it was a cultural genocide that preceded the very real genocides that would follow. Groundwork laid for the industrial killing processes where exclusion and expulsion developed into extermination.
Here at the current Bebelplatz (formerly Opern Platz/Franz-Josef-Platz) one of the earliest and most visible examples of that movement towards cultural genocide took place in Nazi Germany.
On May 10th 1933, around 40,000 people gathered to hear Nazi Propaganda Minister condemn the works of ‘intellectual filth’ and the ‘Jewish asphalt literati’ to the flames of an immense bonfire. “No to decadence and moral corruption!” Goebbels enjoined the crowd. “Yes to decency and morality in family and state!”
Erich Kästner, author of the popular childrens story ‘Emil and the Detectives’, was one of the only writers to witness his books being burned in Berlin on May 10th 1933. He would be declared “culturally Bolshevist” by the Nazi Party and denied membership in the new Nazi-controlled national writers’ guild.
One month earlier, this so-called ‘Day of Action Against the Un-Germanic Spirit’ had been announced by the German Student Union (Deutsche Studentenschaft), a great joyous ceremony to include live music, singing, ‘fire oaths’, and incantations – would climax in a literary purge or ‘cleansing’ (“Säuberung”) by fire.
Along with the wholescale demand that universities become centres of German nationalism, the students organised similar book burnings in 34 university towns across the country. While not completely wiping out the works of authors and writers deemed ‘degenerate’, this mass-staging of symbolic acts promoting the restriction of freedom of expression would presage an era of uncompromising state censorship and a campaign of cultural genocide that would eventually extend into the Nazi occupied territories of Europe. While promoting their distorted vision of the future the National Socialist movement was also careful to cultivate a sense of a shared and pure German past.
The decision to host this book burning in central Berlin sent a message to the populace regarding one of the central tenets of National Socialist control – that of complete submission and respect of a carefully cultivated Party line. The choice of location, on the square in front of the city’s most prestigious university made this event doubly impactful.
Humboldt University (as it is now known) opened in 1810, under the administration of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian politician and philosopher responsible for the vaunted Humboldtian model of education. Despite never finishing his own university education, Humboldt became one of the most influential voices in German education – encouraging the University of Berlin to operate according to scientific, as opposed to market-driven, principles such as curiosity, freedom of research, and internal objectives.
The university is home to twenty nine Nobel prize winners, including Fritz Haber, Theodor Mommsen, Robert Koch, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Werner von Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Chemistry, Medicine, Physics and Literature are the speciality subjects of the university.
Other notable alumni include; Otto von Bismark, Feuerbach & Fichte, Friedrich Engels, Heinrich Heine, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Karl Liebknecht, Herbert Marcuse, Arthur Schoepenhauer, Felix Mendelsohn Bartholdy, Kurt Tucholsky. Rudolf Virchow (‘the father of modern pathology’) and Robert Havemann.
Arguably though, the most important figures with their names attached to this university would be the two Humboldt brothers from whom the university gets its current name – Wilhelm and his more widely-known sibling, Alexander. Both would promote the development of education as a free and open enterprise to shape society not around the set societal structure – but around the interests and expertises that would develop from the cultivation of the individual.
This great sense of understanding within society would only develop through the unobstructed exposure of individuals to things beyond their horizon. Alexander von Humboldt would famously comment that: “it is no less useless for the carpenter to have learned Greek than it is for the scholar to make tables.” Outside the university now – almost every day of the year, come rain, come shine – is a book sale, run in cooperation with the institution but by private sellers. Its presence stands are a symbolic challenge to the history and Nazi use of the square opposite. To great leaders, and great powers – good or bad – image is everything. As such it must be maintained, by sword or by pen.
Here it is possible to purchase the works of authors persecuted by the Nazis, who would also have their intellectual property condemned to the flames or the nearby cultural bonfire. Although beyond the expected list of degenerate author’s works one might expect, it is also possible to find other works – contemporary and modern.
Every year, the former Opera Square also plays host to an annual book sale, allowing the many small publishing houses across Germany to step into the spotlight. Regardless of the content of their publications, it is the free flowing dialogue of expression that is promoted here that acts as one of the most important fundamentals of a successful democratic society.
The Basic Law of German is currently clear on this subject: “Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures, and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources.”
Not only does the individual have the right to freely express themselves but the public has the ability then to judge for themselves the significance of those words and engage in dialogue.
Rather than flames, we have the realm of fiction and non-fiction.
The Humboldt University Website
