Naturally, Lady Rumbold and Constantia were there, on this occasion escorted by three stalwart young diplomats. Constantia described how the students threw their flaming torches on to the pyre as they filed past. Soon it was a roaring blaze with huge tongues of flame shooting up into the sky. Lady Rumbold, who thought the students quite demented and ‘wanting in a sense of humour’, wondered why, as they were destroying Jewish literature so enthusiastically, they did not burn the Bible as well – ‘it would be logical’.28 They listened to the students’ president, in full Nazi regalia, urging his
Naturally, Lady Rumbold and Constantia were there, on this occasion escorted by three stalwart young diplomats. Constantia described how the students threw their flaming torches on to the pyre as they filed past. Soon it was a roaring blaze with huge tongues of flame shooting up into the sky. Lady Rumbold, who thought the students quite demented and ‘wanting in a sense of humour’, wondered why, as they were destroying Jewish literature so enthusiastically, they did not burn the Bible as well – ‘it would be logical’.28 They listened to the students’ president, in full Nazi regalia, urging his fellow students to protect the purity of German literature. As their books were committed to the flames, the guilty authors were named: ‘Sigmund Freud – for falsifying our history and degrading its great figures’, Erich Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western Front) – ‘for degrading the German language and the highest patriotic idea’; the list seemed endless. In addition to Jewish writers, figures such as Thomas Mann (winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929), Helen Keller and Jack London were among the damned. Papers and books ransacked from Dr Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science were pitched on to the fire with particular fervour. Then came the climax when at midnight Goebbels mounted a rostrum and declared, ‘Jewish intellectualism is dead … the German soul can again express itself.’ As bonfires burned all over the country, Birchall finished his piece fo...
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Book burning after 100 days.
