Book Burning Memorial

Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen
Heinrich Heine, From his play Almansor (1821)

The book burning of 1933 is marked by a small square window into the underground in the middle of Bebelplatz. Without a crowd surrounding the small memorial, I would have easily walked over it without noticing. Even as I squeezed through the people to one corner of the memorial, the glare from the sunlight and shadows of the strangers around me made it difficult to make out anything beyond semi-translucent glass. When my eyes finally did adjust and focused passed the glass window beneath my feet, I could make out an empty square room surrounded all four sides by empty white book shelves.

The presentation was simple: here is the site where the Nazis displayed that its ideology cannot be challenged by erasing the lessons of history with flames. But the implications are great. What begins as a book burning to silence opposition, would end with the burning of millions of corpses that fell victim to the same Nazi ideology.

As Heinrich Heine stated almost a century before the Nazi book burning “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”