IH reports - 1. It's been 90 years since the Nazis burned books deemed "un-German" at the Opera Square in Berlin. 

On Jan. 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor; in February, the first emergency statute was enacted; on March 22, the Dachau concentration camp was established; in April, Jews were prohibited from working in the German public sphere; and on May 10, the book-burning ceremony took place – near the location where Martin Luther had burned the Exsurge Domine several centuries earlier. 

The world saw eradication, destruction, and elimination of "public burning of noxious Jewish writings" – according to criteria set by Joseph Goebbels.

It was not arranged by the government but by a group of overly keen university students who received Goebbels's blessing. In early May, a hasty but well-organized operation was conducted to loot public and academic libraries, archives, and private collections, and thousands of books were taken. 

It was just books authored by Jews – by Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Alfred Doblin, Anna Seghers and hundreds more – but also works and reference materials written by non-Jewish authors who were deemed too contrarian, liberal, communist, pacifist, Catholic, gay or anarchist. 

Goebbels declared at the event, which was attended by tens of thousands, "The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path...The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character." 

The Opera Square was only the beginning. In the months to follow, student groups organized book burnings across Germany: Munich, Dresden, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg. In total, around 70 book-burning ceremonies were held. 

2. When Rabbi Haninah ben Teradion was wrapped in a scroll and set ablaze by the Romans for going against the ban to teach Torah, his disciples asked him what he saw, to which he replied, "I see the parchment burning, but its letters are flying to the heavens."

Jewish tradition says that the Hebrew letter, word, text are the reflection of the hidden wonders of creation. It is said of Bezalel that he possessed such great wisdom that he could combine the letters with which heaven and earth were created. 

The Babylonian Talmud says, "And if one is standing close to the deceased when the soul leaves the body, he is obligated to rend his garment; To what is this similar? It is similar to a Torah scroll that was burned." And Rashi adds that the burning of a Torah scroll also obligates the tearing of one's garment, as mourners do. 

During his visit to Israel in 1998, French-Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida visited the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Center and spoke of the word "Holocaust" – of Greek origin meaning "burn everything" – and its uniqueness. 

"I believe that today one cannot burn anything at all, not even a love letter, without thinking about the great Holocaust of this era, not only the gas chambers and the crematoria but also the burned books, at the beginning of Hitlerism, when they threw all of Freud's or Kafka's books and burned them in the public square, this too belonged to the order of holocaust," Derrida said. 

He also referred to the totality and particularity of the extermination of the Jews, even at the cost of "diminishing" the Holocaust to hardships and daily book burnings. But he echoed the ancient act: the books that were burned at the Opera Square, and the ones that are destined to be burnt. After all, if actual people are being burned in the world, what are books? 

This evil plot will never succeed: the Confucian scholars in China during the Qin dynasty, the supporters of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola in Florence in 1497, the burning of the Talmud and later the Quran, Emperor Charles V who ordered Luther's books to be destroyed. The parchment is forever burned and is buried in ash, but the letters return home. They return to the page and to humanity, and not even fire can make them disappear. 

They say that literature is not found in the lines, but in the space between them. That is where the vault is that holds the meaning, untouched by the greatest of thieves. In its book form, it is only temporary. Literature does not depend on print editions, but on remaining always present in the mind. 

And yet, book burning evokes great pain and shock, as if it were a living thing. Burning is not just an act of erasure; it is an act of extreme disgust and opposition. The burner mocks the possibility of the existence of the book. He understands that the content will never decay, but is content with the proclamation denying its creation. 

Therefore, every burning forces us to think about the Holocaust, about the "burning of everything," a flame that allows nothing to escape. 

3. The books have been burnt for 2,200 years. And they keep burning. But what is the threat that the book poses? 

One can shred a book, tear it up, throw it into the river, throw it in the bin; one can lock it away in a safe house or bury it in the ground, stain its pages with ink, submerge it in water until the writing is blurred. There are endless ways to destroy a book, including confiscating it, censoring it, and burying it under the weight of bureaucracy. 

But burning it is the worst of all, for no other action is more suffocating and repulsive. 

In the modern era as well, where knowledge is perceived as eternal and immune, the book is subject to a constant threat of destruction. The text is not the goal of those seeking its destruction, but what it symbolizes. It is like a flag at the top of the pole that must be taken down, no matter what. It's hard to break away from this human pathology.

Hundreds more book-burning ceremonies have been held since 1933: in 1946, the Iranian forces defeated the Kurdish government and following the victory, burned all Kurdish-language literature found in the state's institutions; in 1948, and over the decade that followed, thousands of comic books were burned on the East Coast of the United States – in schoolyards and encouraged by teachers and parents; in 1973, as part of the coup d'etat in Chile, General Augusto Pinochet's men ordered the burning of the books that were deemed "subversive." In the same year, at a high school in North Dakota, dozens of copies of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" were set on fire because they were "profane." 

Furthermore, in 1981, an outburst of rage by the security forces in Sri Lanka as a protest against the death of three policemen led to the burning of a public library in the city of Jaffna in the country's north when over 95,000 books were destroyed; a decade later books were burned in the ethnic wars in the Commonwealth of Nations and the Balkans; in 1992, during the Abkhaz–Georgian conflict, Georgian forces broke into the Abkhazian Scientific-Research Institute of Language, Literature and History in Sukhumi and set the building on fire; that same year, the National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo was bombed and 1.5 million books were destroyed, with Serbian nationalists shooting anyone who tried to save the works. 

In Italy in 2006, in the town of Ceccano, two local councilors publicly burned a copy of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," calling it "blasphemous." In 2008, yeshiva students in Or-Yehuda torched hundreds of copies of the New Testament. And this was hardly the first time this book of scripture was burned in Israel.

4. After the war, the Opera Square in Berlin was renamed to "Bebel Square," after German politician August Bebel. 

In 1995, the Emtpy Library public memorial by Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman was inaugurated on the square. dedicated to the remembrance of the Nazi book burnings that took place there. It is a subterranean room lined with empty white bookshelves, beneath a glass plate in the pavement of the square. 

Ullman said that when he first arrived at the square to think about ideas for a monument, it was a rainy day and he saw puddles on the ground. I could see "the reflection of the sky in the puddles, and I saw for the first time the image of smoke and fire."

Walking by the monument today, not every pedestrian will notice it. The monument deals with absence, Ullman explained in 2016, and tries to touch not only on the book burning but also on what happened in the years after the event. There is no way to express the magnitude of the event if you look at it as a whole, and that is why I chose absence. Each of us can see himself as a victim of the event, being thrown into a pit, but also as an executioner of the act.

The space allows for the storage of around 20,000 books but stands empty. Ninety years after the burning of the books, the smoke has not cleared. The letters are still flying to the heavens.

Source - Israel Hayom/Twitter - Image - University of Washington