Book-burning: fanning the flames of hatred Jon Henley, Friday 10 September 2010 /The Guardian On the night of 10 May 1933, a crowd of some 40,000 people gathered in the Opernplatz – now the Bebelplatz – in the Mitte district of Berlin. Amid much joyous singing, band-playing and chanting of oaths and incantations, they watched soldiers and police from the SS and impassioned youths from the German Student Association and Hitler Youth Movement burn, at the behest of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, upwards of 25,000 books decreed to be "un-German". The climax of a month-long nationwide campaign, this best-known of literary bonfires was intended as both a purge and a purification of the true German spirit, supposedly weakened and corrupted by un-German ideas and intellectualism. The volumes consigned to the flames in Berlin, and more than 30 other university towns around the country on that and following nights, included works by more than 75 German and foreign authors, among them (to cite but a few) Albert Einstein, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Lenin, Jack London, Heinrich, Ludwig, Karl Marx, John Dos Passos, Leon Trotsky, HG Wells, Émile Zola and Stefan Zweig. Also among the authors whose books were burned that night was the great 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine, who barely a century earlier, in 1821, had written in his play Almansor the words: "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen" – "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people." There's something uniquely symbolic about the burning of books. It goes beyond the censoring of beliefs and ideas. A book, plainly, is something more than ink and paper, and burning one (or many) means something more than destroying it by any other means. Goebbels, of course, was by no means the first to recognise the symbolism: authorities around the world, both secular and religious, have known since the Chinese Qin dynasty in 200BC that book-burning is an act of peculiar potency. The poet, philosopher and political theorist John Milton, whose books were publicly burned in England and France, gives perhaps the best explanation of why authorities down the centuries have seen danger in certain books. "Books are not absolutely dead things," he wrote in his celebrated attack on censorship, Areopagitica, in 1644, "but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are." Anyone who kills a man, Milton said, kills "a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself". Throughout history, says Matt Fishburn, author of Burning Books, most official book-burnings have been about "control", to announce "what a regime stands for". The burnings were the symbol; the repressive legislation that came in their wake was what really enforced it." More innocently, people have long lit celebratory bonfires to mark the end of one phase in their lives and the start of another: graduating students may burn unpopular textbooks at the end of a course. But it is as an official means of suppressing dissenting or heretical views that book-burning has acquired its infamy. The practice features prominently in two of the 20th century's more alarming novels about authoritarian future societies: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, in which book-burning has become institutionalised in a wholly hedonistic, anti-intellectual US, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where unapproved books and tracts are consumed by flames in a "memory hole". It also crops up in the Bible. A passage in the New Testament Book of Acts (Acts 19: 19-20) suggests Christian converts in Ephesus burned books of "curious arts", generally taken to mean traditional magic. More recently, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses was ceremonially burned in Bolton and Bradford in 1988 and in Rome they burned The Da Vinci Code. Why burning, though, rather than some other kind of destruction? The symbolism of flames is plain. For Andrew Motion, former poet laureate, "books are little encapsulations of human effort and wisdom and of our sense of history. So to burn one of any kind, and certainly one that is a representation of a culture and set of beliefs, is to appear to consign it to the flames of eternal damnation”.