**Sorry about the title: I meant “and what books they burned and what books they didn’t.”
For a writing class, I’ve been doing a lot of research in to Nazi Germany as I'm thinking about writing a story that follows a group of young boys leading up to the book burnings on May 10th, 1933. I want to make sure I’m as historically accurate as possible, so I wanted to come here to see if anyone had any ideas or directions they could point me in.
I know that they burned Jewish literature, Karl Marx, pacifist texts, etc., but I read somewhere that they also burned Sir Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Monmouth's King Arthur. Did they burn either of those two texts/would they have burned King Arthur for occultism or was it still considered canon?
Also, what would be the punishment for harboring said books? Were people actually punished, or were the books just taken away? To what extent did people care?
Any and all insight is super helpful!! Thank you so much!!
The book burnings of May 10, 1933 were not an official state sponsored or ordered affair, based on an officially published list of banned books. Rather, they were mainly the initiative of the Deutsche Studentenschaft, a nation-wide student organisation that had become steadily more militant and nationalist with the strengthening of the Nazi party.
After the Nazi rise to power in January 1933 and the Reichstag fire in February, the Nazis had suspended civil liberties and supressed communist organisations. This led to the SA (stormtroopers) raiding the offices of said organisations, destroying and incidentally setting fire to their papers and books. The Hitlerjugend followed suit by burning books at school and public libraries that they considered subversive, these included Marxist, pacifist, democratic, and "smutty" works (Boccaccio's Decamerone was among the victims).
In April the Deutsche Studentenschaft published its Lutheresque "Twelve Theses against the Un-German Mindset" (Zwölf Thesen wider den undeutschen Geist) in the Nazi newspaper Völkische Beobachter. Its main arguments were that every German is responsible for maintaining the purity of German language and literature against its main enemy: the Jew and his henchmen. Later in April they received a provisional blacklist from the Committee for the Overhauling of Berlin City and Public Libraries, authored by librarian Wolfgang Hermann, of which I am unable to find an April copy. A slightly later copy is listed here. They used this list to gather books from libraries as well as bookstores in preparation for the planned nationwide burning on May 10. This original list encompassed only the realm of literature, in the next few weeks, Hermann distributed several non-fiction lists as well.
So what was on this list?
First of all, it was maintained by the Deutsche Studentenschaft that all German Jewish authors were anathema, or as they put it in their Theses:
Der Jude kann nur jüdisch denken. Schreibt er deutsch, dann lügt er. (The Jew can only think Jewish. If he writes in German, he is lying)
[...]
Jüdische Werke erscheinen in hebräischer Sprache. Erscheinen sie in Deutsch, sind sie als übersetzung zu kennzeichnen. Schärfstes Eintreten gegen den Missbrauch der deutschen Schrift. Deutsche Schrift steht nur Deutschen zur Verfügung. (Jewish writings are to be published in Hebrew. If they appear in German, they must be marked as translations. Severe action against the abuse of German script. German script can only be used by Germans.)
Therefore, whether a Jewish (German) author appeared on the list or not was immaterial, though there were many that did feature. For some, only certain books were allowed or banned, Franz Werfel is one (a convert to Christianity who wrote a famous life of Bernadette, the peasant girl who had visions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, which curiously was banned while another of his religious works wasn't).
Non-Jewish authors include opponents of the Nazis (Wegner, Tucholsky), known marxists (Barbusse, Brecht), foreign authors with leftist leanings (Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair), anti-war writers (Hemingway's A farewell to arms, Remarque, Hasek).
Further Reading:
Guenter Lewy (2016) Harmful and Undesirable: Book Censorship in Nazi Germany
Jan Pieter Barbian (2019) Literaturpolitik im "Dritten Reich": Institutionen, Kompetenzen, Betätigungsfelder
Bibliothek verbrannter Bücher: online resource by the Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien.