King’s Square
Königsplatz was deserted and ghostly on the freezing morning at the end of March when I crossed it for the first time. A purplish sky crushed against the monumental columns of the Propylaea and the Glyptothek, and a strong northerly wind was at my back. The geometric swatches of grass that shape the square had been made intolerably green by the night’s rain. In the past it had been paved in bricks and covered with banners, enclosed by two little temples dubbed the Honour Temples in memory of those who died during the failed putsch of 1923, who had been moved there in sixteen bronze sarcophagi. Hitler would have also liked to be buried there and, if things had gone differently, that morning I would have been standing in front of his gigantic mausoleum.
I had just visited the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, which stood only a few metres away in a rationalist and essentialist building raised on the same site where a century before the general part headquarters, the Brown House, had stood. Everything started here, the guide had said, and then added, And who knows, but those three words had been left hanging, as if they had escaped from his mouth, but by then he had spoken them and he was forced to finish the sentence, And who knows whether the square we have in front of us could still tell us something, but he stopped there, and said no more, said nothing about what had started to happen again on the eastern borders of Europe, said nothing about Ukraine, nothing about Russia, there was no need, within themselves everybody knew that, since the pandemic, the world had again come off its hinges.
The Night of Ashes
At the stroke of midnight on the tenth of May, 1933 in Königsplatz, as in many other German squares, besides holding the first Hitlerian gatherings, the Nazis burned thousands of books. These ceremonies were called Bücherverbrennungen.
In one of the many photographs of that night, you can see thousands of arms raised in the Roman salute around a bonfire: soldiers, civilians, students. The uniforms stand out, the regalia of the guilds. Some smile, others have their shirt sleeves rolled up; they grasp flaming torches in their fists, like priests, next to a pyre of wood and a podium hung with flags and banners. From somewhere comes the sound of a little orchestra. Drums roll; you can sense the blare of the fanfare and a penetrating smell of cellulose and benzine. A smell like vanilla, like mould. The announcer’s voice calls out the title of each work before throwing it into the fire; the crowd cheers as one. Who knows what the excitement of those hours had been, all the bustle of new and used books being thrown into the street, the doors of libraries and schools thrown open, private bookshops emptied. “The German man of the future will no longer be a man made of books but a man of character,” Joseph Goebbels had announced on that tenth of May in Berlin, in front of 40,000 people, before giving the order to burn the writings of Heinrich Mann, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque. “This is a powerful and symbolic act—an act which should inform the whole world of our intentions.”
I had to walk away hurriedly towards the U-Bahn station because I was no longer used to open spaces and that immense, empty square was giving me vertigo. I had read about it in the history books but without giving it much thought. The Bücherverbrennung had not been a random propaganda event, a one-off stunt: it had been a statement. The fires would continue throughout 1933 and in the years to follow. It is estimated that by the end of the war hundreds of thousands of books had been burnt, the equivalent of one of the world’s biggest libraries, but, as with the number of the dead, it is an approximate figure.
“A powerful and symbolic act—an act which should inform the whole world of our intentions.”
What type of bureaucracy had produced that will to annihilate all contemporary culture considered hostile to national socialism, and also culture from the more distant past that was considered harmful or corrupting? Which departments of censorship and inquisition had been created and mobilised? Who had compiled the blacklist?
Descending the steps to the U-bahn, a poster advertised a publishing house’s latest releases. I passed in front of it and one of the early chapters of Don Quixote came to mind: “Of the diverting and minute scrutiny performed by the curate and the barber, in the library of our sagacious hero.” Another thought struck me: had the works of any Italian writers also been tossed into the fire?
Don Quixote’s Library
I have always imagined the book room of Don Quixote’s Signor Alonso Quijano to be quite small, almost a secret room in the house—a sort of monastic cell or private chapel where one could retreat into silence; isn’t reading after all a secular form of prayer? In the evening, it is lit by the weak light that enters through a small vertical window in the atrium and a simple candle. A rough wooden table, a chair, the walls lined with shelves. Outside, the whirling of dust in the white streets and a harsh, rural landscape.
It is there within, in the whirlwind of reading romances, that Alonso Quijano loses his wits and transforms into a man made of books and without character, the opposite of the ideal proposed by Goebbels for the future of Germany. A man so without character that he comically assumes the nature and personality of the chivalric heroes whose deeds he was so eager to know about. But, I thought that day on the German U-bahn, if on one side this room bordered on insanity, on the other it was close to Königsplatz and the other squares on the tenth of May. You only had to open the window to see the piles of ashes still crackling in the courtyard.
In the book, the curate had asked the niece for the key to the room. The servant too had rushed to his aid with a bowl of holy water and the aspergillum so that the reverend could bless the place and free it from the seductive power of books, “the cause of so many misfortunes”. The intention was no different from that of Goebbels when he spoke of the evil spirit of the past and the degenerate art that had invaded his country: “No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in the family and the state!” He and Don Pedro Pérez even seem to have similar voices, identical traits: the air of a priest, hair combed back, face gaunt and bony. Only the uniform changes. It is this restorer of order who examines the titles of the books in the room one by one and decides which deserve the punishment of fire; he is joined by an emergency tribunal made up of a lawyer, who at turns wears the garb of either prosecution or defence (Master Nicolò, the barber), and a public jury (the niece and the servant).
The library is modest but well stocked. For the most part, it houses chivalric romances, pastoral romances, and epic poems: 100 very-well-bound volumes and many other less weighty ones. They begin with Amadis of Gaul. Since it is the first of its type printed in Spain, and therefore the “lawgiver of such a pernicious sect”, the curate wants to give it to the flames “without hesitation”. But the barber asks for it to be pardoned precisely because of its originality, which makes it the best amongst all those that imitate it. The curate accepts the petition and saves its life. For all the rest, the trial is instantaneous and with no right of appeal. Beyond the ill-fated influence they exerted over Don Alonso, the books are judged guilty of mediocrity, arrogance, stupidity, and from the dock are thrown straight out the window: the quickest way to get them into the courtyard and onto the pile to be burned. Not even the Galatea by Miguel de Cervantes is saved. All leniency is denied until the promised second part of the story appears—since the author “is more conversant with misfortunes than with poetry . . . his book . . . proposes something though it concludes nothing.”
Only when Boiardo and then Ariosto are named does the curate seem disposed to make an exception: “should I find him here speaking in any other language than his own, I would pay no regard; but, if he talks in his own idiom, I will place him on my head in token of respect.” Aristo’s Italian thus obtains a salvific dispensation. Orlando furioso is exempted from the pyre on the condition that it is printed in its mother tongue. As for those books that deal with French matters, it is decreed instead that they be put into a dry well, a pozo seco, until their fate is decided.
I have often asked myself how that room would have looked after the curate, the barber, the niece, and the servant had finished their work. Shelves reduced to bare bones, dust on the floor, neglect, disorder. And how it would have become after they bricked up the door. A blind, buried, violated library. The first thing Don Quixote does when he gets out of bed, after having been delirious for days, is “go to see his books”, but when he fails to find the room, he starts looking for it everywhere. When he returns to the place where the entrance should have been, he looks around, lost, and lays his hands on the wall. The gesture always makes me think of a medical inspection, as if he had placed his hands on the heart of a dying animal, or upon his own. How much anguish must have fallen upon him when they told him that it was a magician who took it away?
Who knows if it was this room, emptied of books and walled up, that inspired the Israeli artist Micha Ullman when he created a library composed of only two materials—silence and emptiness—to recall the bonfires at the epicentre of all the other fires that were arranged that May night in Germany. The Empty Library, Bebelplatz, Berlin. An underground room of empty shelves capable of holding the more than 20,000 volumes that were burned in that corner of the square. A catacomb without entrance—and what would be the good of entering anyway?—but visible every day through a square porthole under the feet of each passer-by.
Like three centuries earlier in the house of Alonso Quijano, the Nazis also made a diverting and minute scrutiny of all the contaminated works that had led the world to the madness of communism, pacifism, and psychoanalysis. But this time around, what treatment did Italian literature and language receive? This was the question that assailed me that morning in the Munich U-Bahn. With one footnote: if the curate is Goebbels in this story, and if it is pointless, given how long the list is, to ask the names of the servants and nieces, then who is the barber?
Equinoxes
It had been so long since I’d been on a plane, since I’d slept in other beds, since I’d met other human beings in the flesh. In the last two years, I’d lived like a hermit, barricaded in an attic, studying and writing all day. The pandemic deprived us of many things—for me, some loved ones, a certain idea of literature, a certain idea of reality—and left behind this sense of emptiness. Until now, I’d only been to Germany once, many years before. A friend had bought a period house in Berlin with big white windows. He bought it cheap—a bargain he’d said—and one spring he rented it to my family and me for a week. I had a confused, residing memory of the experience. Lots of walks, some museums, three rolls of film. One image shows us at the feet of a giant statue of Marx and Engels, and we seem happy.
This current journey was born from a lucky situation and from the generous exuberance of Monika Lustig, a publisher from Karlsruhe. As soon as the borders were reopened, I’d received a flattering invitation for a circuit of conferences in four institutes of Italian culture: Hamburg, Cologne, Stuttgart, and Munich. It wouldn’t be a holiday trip, at least not exclusively. The programme planned continual train journeys and changes of hotel, and only a few half-days free. A little tour of a thousand kilometres in four days, from the estuary of the Elbe on the North Sea, right down towards the Austrian border. Typing the itinerary into my phone, it looked like a long blue vein down the spine of Europe. It was three weeks until Easter and I was enjoying an unusual period of study leave that was coming to an end, and I wouldn’t even need to ask for holidays from the administration of the library where I work. So, all I had to do to get organised was accept the offer and get on a Lufthansa flight that Saturday at the end of March when the clocks change, one of only two dates in the year when the night is equal to the day. After all, leaving is much simpler than deciding to leave, and a change of air would do me good.
On the way to the exit, the walls of Hamburg airport show a gigantic mural crowded with writing in block letters: testimonies, memories, impressions from famous people. In one, John Lennon confesses that he became a man in this city. It happened in the Hamburg club where the Beatles had made their debut, one night in the middle of August 1960. They weren’t yet twenty and were living in the back of an abandoned cinema, in the red-light district of St Pauli. I didn’t have to meet anyone until the day after, so I promised myself I’d go there straight away. I’ve always been interested in the debuts of artists, the secrets they hold, and I’ve never investigated enough.
At the airport I got on a train that took me to the central station; from there, I could have reached my hotel on foot and freed myself from my bags. But on the platform facing me, hundreds of women and children fleeing the eastern borders of Ukraine were descending from another convoy and filling the platform with flags. I’d only read about something like this in history books and soon I felt ashamed even to look. The world had fallen again “into a darkness so black and deep” that “it seemed to have gone headfirst into an inkwell full of ink,” so Collodi had written 140 years before. I don’t know whether a whale or a dogfish had swallowed us again, or whether it was us who had gone under, but again our story had certainly become a story of shipwreck, of collective shipwreck. Yet from the stomach of that animal, by the glow of another simple candle, like those used by Master Geppetto to give light or by Signor Alonso Quijano in his room of books, I finally seemed to see things as they really were. I had arrived in Hamburg with a little notebook in my pocket and a question hammering in my brain: if I could no longer use what was there before, with what ink should I write? And read? And remember?
Some Burned the Books Themselves
Over a few days, I wrote a list of all the book burnings in “human history” of which at least a mention exists. No type of book had been spared the flames; nothing had been saved and by no one: El Escorial, Baghdad, Alexandria, the Sumerian tablets and Aristotle’s books on “Comedy,” the papyri from Herculaneum, the Torah, Talmud, Bible, Qur’an, texts against Catholic doctrine but also against Islamic, Peter Abelard and Arnold of Brescia, vernacular and Arabic, Jewish, Latin, classical poems and philosophical tracts, erotic literature and Mayan manuscripts, Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and ‘J’accuse’ by Émile Zola. Caliphs, bishops in Italy and Mexico, monastic preachers, Chinese emperors, Romans and French, and ecclesiastical councils and tribunals persecuted everything that they held to be unfavourable to themselves, immoral, or blasphemous. Antonio Tabucchi says that literature always has the same enemies, the same detractors, adversaries both internal and external, and the same assassins.
Some years after the end of the Second World War, even a symbolic echo of such widespread devastation and its ferocious upswing in Nazi Germany was enough to push the young science fiction writer Ray Bradbury to represent an upside-down world in which firefighters, the “firemen”, have the task of burning the houses of all those who keep books. The idea was born from a short story, ‘The Fireman’, which Bradbury later developed and called Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which paper burns.
But if the list of book burnings is infinitely long, it is even more difficult to keep an account or compile a register of all the books that have been censored and sent to be pulped. In the last four centuries, the curate, the barber, the niece, and the servants of Don Quixote would have had a lot to do discussing the destiny of many potentially scandalous titles, and they would have been forced to increase the pile in the courtyard considerably. And perhaps they would never have imagined that the same novel that contained them would have been the first to be banned by General Pinochet the day following the coup d’état of 11 September 1973, because it was judged to be the progenitor of all the subversive, unhealthy, and dangerous literature of our times and, what is more, it was in Spanish.
The oblivion machine has many methods, however. For some ethnic groups, writers like the Kurdish political leader Abdullah Öcalan, author of one of the most advanced political theories, democratic confederalism, do not appear on Turkey’s blacklists, which also regulate the circulation of books in prisons, in order to not even recognise their existence. It is an even more radical type of condemnation. They are treated like ghosts; they are erased from the lists of forbidden books out of a desire to strike their names from history and every record. As if they had never written a line, as if they had never been born. To keep them safe, people bury their books in the mountains. Or they are forced to burn them, because being found in possession of one can cost your life.
“All my friends have had to destroy their entire libraries at least once,” recalls Bachtyar Ali, a Kurdish writer who my daughter’s friend recommended to me. “Some burned the books themselves, otherwise family members did it to avoid problems. Whoever didn’t manage to do it dug deep pits to bury the books in . . . My childhood was characterised by the danger of books. Still today I associate them with guilt and transgression.” In the East, Ali concludes, reading is a very risky activity. There, books are not even innocuous in public libraries because the secret police also control the list of loans. “The states of the East, including Iran, do not fear books in themselves, but readers. A true reader with many books is always suspect . . . Readers are more dangerous than books. A reader, even if they don’t read forbidden books, is a potential threat for those who hold the power in the East.”
When Bachtyar Ali fled to Germany, during his first interrogation as a refugee, when the police official asked why he had requested asylum, he responded that, while there were many reasons, he had come to be able to finally read in peace. “I’ve never heard anything like it,” the official replied, “here we don’t give asylum to someone just so they can read.” Bachtyar Ali smiled. “No, I was only joking.” In the glimpse, he saw that, all over the world, readers are not popular.
