Chapter 10 The Burning #2
Then from somewhere behind Peter stepped an older man with a spotless new SA uniform. Helene was taken aback to recognize
Mr. Fuchs, the one who had pressured her so hard to push the communist agenda.
“Miss Nathan, it is in your best interest to comply. We have strict orders from the minister. If you resist, the police will
arrest you and, if needed, we will burn the building down.”
Though Helene knew Fuchs’s passionate nature, the force of his threats surprised her.
“Tell us what titles you’re looking for, and we’ll bring them out to you,” she said in her calm librarian tone.
But the ex-communist lost his patience and pushed the doors open. “Grab all the books, and put them on the truck!” he shouted.
Twentysomething males, most of them wearing shorts, ran up and down the aisles. They did not limit themselves to removing
the books on the list. They had a grand time emptying the shelves completely and tossing volumes at one another like in a
twisted playground game.
Lena covered her face with her hands and frequently closed her eyes to keep herself from intervening. Klaus, one of the most
patient men on earth, was chewing the insides of his cheeks and breathing deeply while swallowing back his tears. Helene was
the most composed of the three. She concentrated all her thoughts on the volumes they were saving in secret.
Fuchs seemed delighted with the spectacle. He could finally demolish the place that had resisted him for so long. It had not been too difficult for him to switch sides. Rather than living in service of ideas, he preferred for the ideas to serve him.
“I believe that today you’ve seen how destiny chastens all mortals with the same whip. You always looked down at me with your
nasty superiority, but the only thing that’s truly superior is our German race,” he spluttered at Helene, pops of saliva marking
his fervor.
“No matter what you say, I’m more convinced than ever that beauty is what will save the world,” Helene responded, before Fuchs
slapped her.
Lena and Klaus ran up to defend her, but she waved them back. “No, it’s all right. The best way to take revenge on despicable
people is by being happy despite the circumstances.”
The young Nazis loaded their truck with far more books than the librarians had thought would be vulnerable. Before the thieves
left, Fuchs turned and growled, “I’ll be back and will burn this building down with you three inside. But for now, enjoy your
freedom and have a good read!” Then he turned dramatically on his heels and walked away.
Helene, Klaus, and Lena watched in silence as the young Nazis who weren’t in the truck marched away singing and chanting.
Lena was the first to snap out of the stupor of disbelief.
“Helene, are you all right?” she asked, gently touching her friend’s cheek.
“Yes. It sounded worse than it actually was.” Then, unexpectedly, she heard herself say, “Let’s lock up and follow the mob.”
At first her friends did not understand.
“B-but . . .” Klaus stammered, uninterested in heroics.
“We need to see how this ends. I want to see with my own two eyes what these people are capable of so I never ever forget
it.”
They locked up the library and scrunched into Klaus’s beat-up Ford.
The truck of books stopped several times on its route, and anonymous citizens threw books into the back with whoops of joy.
Some tossed books down from balconies, having purged their personal libraries.
At several bookstores the truck paused and the mob repeated their operations, even beating a bookseller who tried to resist. An hour later, they were entering the Opernplatz, where an enormous pile of wood was being carpeted by thousands and thousands of books.
Klaus parked, and the librarians watched as lines of people approached the pyre holding books in bags, in carts, or in boxes.
They were tossed onto the growing pile with shouts of “For Hitler!” Then the people would walk away and stand, arm in arm,
waiting for the ceremony to begin.
The hours went by, and the plaza filled with more and more bodies. When the pyre could hold no more books, people dumped them
all around the edges of the square. To one side there was a platform with microphones, and Goebbels was due to speak right
at 11:00 p.m. Helene, Klaus, and Lena sensed the cool evening air growing electric with the voices of thousands of Nazis gathered
in the plaza to celebrate a sort of witches’ Sabbath that would have been unimaginable a few months prior. In the heart of
that sacred university plaza an altar had been erected to resurrect the pagan gods Germany had broken free from centuries
before. With one stroke, nearly a thousand years had been erased: Germanic Christianity, the battles of the Teutonic Knights,
Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, Frederick the Great, Bismarck, German Romanticism, and the ideas
of Kant and Hegel. Germany had returned to the Dark Ages.
An uptick in shouting from the militant Nazis announced the arrival of Goebbels.
He was a short man in a gray trenchcoat with a labored gate and effeminate features.
He quickly passed through the aisle of torches with his arm raised in salute.
The failed author looked pleased to be burning the works of real authors who had, in one way or another, shaped the history of humanity.
Goebbels climbed up to the stage to make a giant out of his diminutive intellectual and moral stature. When he raised his
right hand as if to take an oath, silence fell on the plaza. A freezing wind stirred, as if in response to the cold hearts
of all those fanatics. The red flags emblazoned with the swastika emblem undulated in their macabre dance, a premonition of
the dancing flames to come. The torch-lit spectacle was straight out of the Inquisition.
When the minister lowered his hand, several SA members approached the main pyre, as well as the smaller piles, and lit them
on fire. Helene’s heart was racing. Young men and women approached with mounds of books in their arms and threw them into
the fire. The flames lit up their eyes, and the plaza rang with their shouts: “Down with Marxist materialists! For the purity
of German culture!”
The lines seemed interminable, and almost all of the book throwers were teenagers. That was what hit Helene, Lena, and Klaus
the hardest: the degree to which Hitler’s fanatical populist ideas had taken hold of the youth.
Helene marveled that in a single day, the world she had always known and believed in was turning to ashes. Surely this was
not her city, her country. She felt like a foreigner. They were destroying everything she loved: books, Berlin, young people,
and language itself.
Goebbels took off his trenchcoat, revealing his brown uniform and red armband.
Like a priest before an altar, he raised his arms and declared in his ostentatious style, “The age of extremist Judaic intellectualism has come to an end. The German revolution has charted a new path for our nation!” His voice started out soft but grew into an intensity that innervated the youth with diabolical energy.
“We won’t allow the pen to keep poisoning our culture.
We want the sword of the German spirit to guide the destiny of our people.
These books have spread lies and deceit, weakening us with defeatism and pessimism.
They have tried to divide us as a people. ”
The shouts of the Nazis joined with Goebbels’s voice, a chorus of demons illuminated by the intense light of the pyres. The
stench of smoke spiraled out and embraced everyone nearby. It rose into a column over Berlin, a new Tower of Babel from which
confusion reigned not in spoken language but in the written words thrown onto the fire.
“Today,” Goebbels continued, “in this pyre, we bury the decadent past. From its ashes will rise the new German man.”
Applause thundered throughout the square. Helene marveled at the people willing to become enslaved. The thought that slaves
had no hope of true happiness brought her no comfort.
“You, the German youth, have fulfilled your duty. This fire serves as a light not only in this square tonight, but also for
the future of Germany.”
The young people continued shouting as they threw ever more books onto the pyre. Helene turned and saw several elderly people
standing nearby, tears in their eyes. At least a few people mourned the Germany that, in dying, gave birth to a new country
of hatred and death.
“Down with decadence and moral corruption! For decency and morality in family and country! The German of the future will not be a man of books only, but a man of character. This is why we educate young people. You’ve done the right thing by throwing the wicked spirit of the past into the flames.
This is a heroic deed, serious and symbolic.
” Goebbels’s last words erupted from deep within his throat.
That night Plato’s cave had come to life. The majority dared only glance at shadows, while the true light of truth was banished
beyond the darkness slowly creeping over the continent.