Burning books to destroy record of people’s past and their right to be present
Unter den Linden crowd of 40, 000 chanted and cheered as books by Jews, homosexuals and communists were burned under bonfire on 10th May 1933. And six decades later Serbian forces on 25th August 1992, bombarded shells down with precision on Sarajevo’s National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Bombs were incendiaries designed to raise fire on impact as Serbian snipers shot firefighters who were trying to save their library.
Rulers and armies have targeted libraries for centuries. During the reformation monastic buildings and their libraries across Europe were torn down.
In England Henry VIII ‘s dissolution of the monasteries followed by destruction of tens of thousands of books.
When American forces attacked British city of York ( today’s Toronto) in 1813, they burned library in the legislative buildings. A year later British forces set fire to the presidential mansion and the Capitol which contained the newly created Library of Congress.
When people burn books, they are destroying the record of people’s past, and through that, their right to be present.
In modern era libraries are far more than stores of literature, through preserving the legal documents such as Magna Carta and records of citizenship, and support the rule of law and the rights of citizens. Today, the knowledge they hold on behalf of society is under attack as never before.
Burning Books explores everything from what really happened to the Great Library of Alexandria to the Windrush papers, from Donald Trump’s deleting embarrassing tweets to John Murray’s burning of Byron’s memoirs in the name of censorship.
Richard Ovenden, head of Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, explains the Nazi’s book burning was a “ warning sign of their policy of genocide”. The attack on the Sarajevo library was “born of the desire to wipe out memory of Muslim participation in Bosnian history and culture”. The Sarajevo library staff formed a human chain in a vain effort to save 1.5 m books, manuscripts and maps.
Ovenden graphically describes the story of the “Paper Brigade”, the Jewish scholars forced by the Nazis in occupied Vilna to select books to be sent to Frankfurt as a record of the soon-to-be-exterminated people and to consign the rest for pulping. Instead, they managed to smuggle books into hiding in the Ghetto. After the war, Antanas Ulpis, who was sympathethic to what remained of Lithuanian jewry, hid Jewish books from the country’s Soviet Overlords, secreting them in a church, even stuffing the organ pipes.
In free societies there is still a danger to our records, in the underfunding and closure of public libraries although it is tempting to think the danger of erasure is now behind us because we can store it all digitally, which is mistake as Digital records are fragile. The UK Web Archive Consortium, a collaboration between six main libraries of the UK and Ireland, has discovered that half the website they preserve disappear from the internet within two years and after three years the figure is 70 per cent.
He is terrified about the large technology companies who holds mountains of digital material without accountability to governments or public. Ovenden wants to tax the tech giants properly so that we can finance preservation of world’s archives. Yech tax justice has proved to be elusive, but this book promotes to take action against censorship, against careless loss and for the preservation of memories of where we cane from and of our right to be where we are.
Today, the Bodleian is the UK’s second biggest library with 13 million printed books, after the British Library.
Ovenden wrote about the Windrush scandal, the denial of residence rights to a group of Caribbean immigrants who had lived legally in the UK for decades. Ovenden was infuriated by the discovery that the HGome Office had destroyed the landing cards of post-second world war Commonwealth arrivals, making it hard for the Windrush immigrants to prove their right to remain. Ovenden wrote “ the card destruction, indicates at best a failure of sound management inside the Home Office, and at worst a culture of callous disregard towards certain categories of Britons”.
Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack by Richard Ovenden, John Murray £20/ Belknap Press $29.99, 320 pages.