Library of Forbidden Books

Prologue

The burials of beloved individuals tend to follow a similar pattern, but this one was completely different.

Berlin was charged with the fervor of the Wall coming down and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the midst of that, a group

of people gathered in the Invalids’ Cemetery. The air smelled of wood-burning fireplaces and the exhaust from a ceaseless

stream of cars on both sides of the Wall. Even the birds seemed to wake from their winter lethargy to greet the new Germany.

Life had continued its customary frenetic pace. And, as if they had made an agreement with destiny, the remaining guardians

gathered for a final farewell to the woman who had changed their lives.

The division of Germany into two countries had separated some of them, but for many, the decision was deemed necessary to

start over and forget everything they had witnessed during the war. They no longer remembered one another’s given names—the

names their parents had hollered when it was time for dinner or in reprimand. They were known by the moniker of the author

whose voice they had borrowed. In a blurring of identities, they had been rebaptized as Kafka, Schiller, Goethe, Mann, Zweig,

Heine, Blum, Freud, K?stner, Brecht.

Some of the guardians were missing, time and war having taken them like the May 1933 fires had devoured the country’s library holdings. The wounds of war were still visible in East Berlin, and even the modern architecture of the west side failed to fully cover up those years of suffering.

A white layer cloaked the nearby tombs, the cypress trees, and the mausoleums that declared one man to be different from another.

Yet the pathetic attempt at distinction crumbled before the reality of death. The brightness of the snow and the milky sky

provided the illumination on that cold winter morning.

The most elderly man in the group held a bouquet of roses. He placed the flowers on the coffin, and the mound of dirt beside

it seemed impatient to erase forever what was left of the life of Helene Nathan. The old man looked at the recently carved

gravestone and with his gnarled fingers traced the letters. They had always been that: just letters, little signs invented

by people. Yet such signs held the power to reveal the depths of the human soul.

Someone in the group broke the silence of the cemetery by reciting the last stanza of Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy”:

Salvation from the chains of tyrants,

Magnanimity even to the evildoer,

Hope on deathbeds,

Mercy from the high court’s bench!

Even the dead will live again!

Brothers, drink with me and sing together,

Sinners will all be forgiven,

And hell itself will be no more.

Someone else started reciting The Metamorphosis:

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous,

verminous bug. He lay on his armor-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown arched abdomen divided

up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay

in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his

eyes.

The recitations continued for half an hour, each voice with its unique pitch and cadence repeating words from the great works

of humanity that blood and fire had tried to reduce to ashes so many years before. Yet once more they took on life in the

throats of those men and women.

A boy approached with a book bound in recently tanned leather. He was in shorts despite the cold, and his red cheeks were

the only breath of life in a place of so much death. He tossed the book onto the coffin, which made a hollow sound, and then

everyone began to sing. It was not a religious hymn, a funeral prayer, or a litany. Rather, it was a forbidden song that now

rang out from every corner of Berlin:

Unity and right and freedom

For the German fatherland!

Let us all pursue this purpose

Fraternally with heart and hand!

Unity and right and freedom

Are the pledge of happiness;

Flourish in this blessing’s glory,

Flourish, German fatherland!

When the last stanza of the anthem faded, that skin-and-bones library of living books slowly separated, embarking upon their

final journey. The words in their throats written on the pages of their minds would not live forever. The human library of

forbidden books was paying their final homage to their guardian and to an era that should never have been.