Modern-Day Book Banning Echoes the Troubling History of WWII
“If the history of book banning has taught us anything, it’s that we should be fighting hate with love and acceptance.”
By Madeline Martin
When I first set out to write The Keeper of Hidden Books, my intent was to share what transpired in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, and to detail the incredibly brave acts of Warsaw’s public librarians in their efforts to save books from looting and destruction. It wasn’t until I was in the galley phase of my book (the final read through before it is sent off to print) when I happened upon an article listing the books that were being banned in my county in Florida. All at once, it dawned on me how timely my book was.
Most people are aware of the massive book burning in Berlin that occurred in May 1933. Hitler commanded his followers to strip books from the shelves of libraries, bookstores, and even their personal collections. Men and women gathered with their texts in hand and a zealous glee in their eyes as they tossed books into the flames. At that very spot today, an underground library memorial lies beneath a layer of glass flush with the cobblestones, revealing enough empty bookshelves for the 20,000 books burned that day. A bronze plaque reads: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.” This quote is from Almansor by Heinrich Heine, written in 1821. Heine’s books were also victims of that hate-fueled pyre.
What many people may not be aware of is that the destruction and banning of books continued long after the ashes of those fires had gone cold, in Germany and throughout the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe. As with many forms of persecution, the destruction of books occurred in small degrees before becoming too great an injustice to easily fight against.
In Warsaw, it started with schools closing and reopening with their libraries missing. It started with a list of 156 titles to be pulled from bookstores and library shelves. And it started with philosophy, mathematics, and science books being looted and relegated for German use only.
In time, more lists rolled out with more books, more authors to remove from Poland’s shelves. Books were sent by the truckload to be pulped to fund the General Government (the Nazi government established in Poland) where the weight of one ton of books yielded the return of a mere nineteen German reichsmarks. Jewish employees were fired from the local libraries and schools before being forced into the ghetto where libraries had to operate in secret until approval was given for the few months they were allowed to legally operate. For Poles, school was limited to a fourth-grade education and all libraries were eventually closed.
I uncovered journals and firsthand accounts from brave librarians who risked their lives to rescue books slated for destruction. They slid banned books between sheets of newspaper then into a hidden warehouse and found ways to operate a clandestine library when they were forced to close their doors to the public. If caught—and some were—they paid with their lives.
The fight for books continued in the Warsaw ghetto. People carried their personal book collections in suitcases for their neighbors to borrow. A former librarian with the Warsaw Public Library, Basia (Barbara) Berman organized a secret children’s library under the auspices of running an orphanage care center.
I uncovered journals and firsthand accounts from brave librarians who risked their lives to rescue books slated for destruction.
Hitler banned books for several reasons, all of which were ultimately to keep him in control of those he sought to lead. He wanted people to fit inside an approved “box” of ideals: the type of family they had to have, the kind of person they had to be, how their thoughts must conform to society. Books that were banned were ones that encouraged socialism, pacifism, and equality: all things that would make people question what was being fed to them by the Reich.
Bigotry, prejudice, and racism also had a major role in the banning of books. Authors who did not represent the Aryan, heterosexual lifestyle Hitler deemed worthy had their books destroyed. And if those authors happened to reside in Nazi-occupied areas, they had to run for their lives. This aspect of banned books played an important role in the genocide that would soon follow.
We read books to find ways to understand the perspectives of others. Stories afford us the opportunity to see the world through other people’s eyes, and in reading a person’s story, we know them. We become them and they become a part of us, an indelible mark that forms the foundation of who we are.
In banning books by those Hitler sought to murder, he made them faceless and nameless to his soldiers and followers. After all, it is far easier to persecute and kill who you do not know, who has been rendered faceless and nameless.
These lists of banned books were put together by the few to be adhered to by the many, oftentimes selected simply for the author’s political stance or personal heritage, and sometimes—ridiculously—by the title alone. In Poland, Our Enemies and Friends, a book about birds, was banned, not because its content was read and judged, but because of the assumption of its content.
It's hard to write fiction set during WWII and not think about history repeating itself. Especially when the books that are being banned today follow an alarming trend.
A majority of the school parents and library patrons today do not support book banning. Not all of these books have been read by those who condemn them, their subject matter simply guessed at for judgment. But most importantly, a strong percentage of books being banned are those written by authors of color or those in the LGBTQ+ community. Removing their books means keeping their stories from being read and understood. It means people are rendered faceless and nameless.
For all our progress in the world, we are still plagued with hate crimes and violence. If the history of book banning has taught us anything, it’s that we should be fighting hate with love and acceptance. We must ensure all stories can be read, and all voices be heard. Instead of limiting individual thought, we should be widening not only minds, but hearts as well. And this is accomplished through the power of books.
October 2, 2023
Madeline Martin is a New York Times, USA TODAY, and international bestselling author of historical fiction and historical romance with books that have been translated into over twenty different languages. Madeline’s book, The Keeper of Hidden Books, was BookBub’s pick for the ‘Best Historical Fiction of Summer.’