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War is good at that—making you remember everything you wish you’d done differently.
It was a strange moment in history to be a politician, when you were sending the nation’s boys to their death while enjoying steak and whiskey lunches on the taxpayers’ tab.
As the publicity director for the Council on Books in Wartime, Viv had become friendly with a good number of journalists in the city.
“All I’m requiring is that your little council doesn’t use taxpayer money to send to our troops books that are lightly veiled political propaganda.”
“This issue has been debated by the United States Congress and has been decided. It’s law now, girlie,” he said, and she heard you lost in the spaces between his words. “You think you know better than the Senate?”
Viv blinked at him. “The soldiers who are dying for us. They need to be told what to read?”
Taft had a deep and abiding hatred of President Roosevelt, and it wasn’t exactly secret. But Roosevelt was popular enough that Taft had to be crafty when he attacked the man. And Roosevelt was a vocal supporter of both the Council on Books in Wartime and its wildly successful initiative that every month shipped
Every time she tried to start her next novel, the blank pages mocked her. How was she supposed to follow up lightning in a bottle?
What is the worst that could happen? she’d asked herself. You could die, the fear whispered back. What is the best? You could live.
It took her a few seconds to realize she’d stopped in the middle of the crowd. Then she noticed what she’d been staring at. Books. They reeled her in, a hook caught in the softness of her belly, the line snapping taut, tugging until she found herself in front of the merchant, her fingers hovering over the leather-bound volumes on display.
troubadour.
I love reading books that require me to look up the definitions of words!
The merchant’s eyes lingered on the book in the same way parents gazed at precocious children. When he looked up, he seemed to read in her face that she might be a kindred soul.
“A gift,” the merchant said, bowing slightly. He tapped the spot over his heart once, and then pointed at her. “Die Bücherfreundin.” “‘A friend of books,’” Diedrich murmured from behind her, his palm heavy on her waist, his chest close enough it brushed against her back when he inhaled.
It had taken her a few years but she had realized love didn’t have to be a white wedding; it could be sharing drinks and gossip on an otherwise terrible day.
But Republicans knew more soldiers voting meant Roosevelt winning, and so they’d thrown as many wrenches as they could into the process. Once they realized the bill was going to get through Congress anyway, they started adding to it every single policy they’d ever wanted to see become law, no matter how useless, self-indulgent, or expensive.
The Deutsch Freiheitsbibliothek was part publisher, part lending library, part gathering place for the German émigré community that had made its home in the City of Lights after fleeing Nazi rule. Born from the scraps of another project—a research initiative that had
collected hundreds of thousands of newspaper clippings, essays, and pamphlets on the dangers of totalitarianism—the library in Paris lived and breathed as a daily effort to counter the rising tide of fascism in France.
personal collections in the weeks after. Anything that was considered anti-German or that might undermine the Reich had to be purged.” Viv let that sit for a beat. “So anything written by Jewish authors.” “And communists and deviants and anyone not espousing the greatness of the master race,” the librarian said. “I don’t think we’ll ever know the true number of how many books were lost in those weeks, and the years after.”
“Books are a way we leave a mark on the world, aren’t they? They say we were here, we loved and
we grieved and we laughed and we made mistakes and we existed. They can be burned halfway across the world, but the words cannot be unread, the stories cannot be untold. They do live on in this library, but more importantly they are immortalized in anyone who has read them.”
A guardian. It was a fanciful notion, perhaps, picturing this woman as a protector of books, but Viv liked the idea.
She had started using stories as a way of understanding all the reasons those other children, and then other adults, were both cruel and beautiful, as well. What she hadn’t acknowledged was how much distance that let her put between herself and other people—she the viewer, the creator, the reader; they the characters, the subjects, the puppets.
Hitler watched them, though, seeming to bask in the cries of love and fealty.
Althea caught sight of men congregating near the door of the building, recognizing Herr Joseph Goebbels from an introductory dinner when she’d first arrived in the city. She had made a special point of talking to him, as he had been the one to actually invite her to Berlin. Technically, her trip was funded through the Nazi Party, but Diedrich had informed her that it was Goebbels’s pet project. Upon meeting him, Althea had been struck by his appreciation for how much books and art and even newer mediums like film could play a role in politics.
She had heard enough from Diedrich’s friends how dire it was to get Hitler into a position of power. He was seen as their only hope, their shining beacon, their savior from men who wanted to keep Germany locked in poverty simply to pad their own pockets.
She’d learned a long time ago that if you faked confidence well enough, other people would start believing you knew what you were doing.
The men who sought violence didn’t understand that while swords could destroy bodies, a pen could destroy a nation.
“Our little wolf has issued decrees to shut down those filthy lie machines they call newspapers,” Helene said, with a sniff.
“You’ve not been a child in a while, I take it.” “No,” Hannah said softly. “You only fall in love like that once, and then forever you love with a fractured heart. Healed though it may be.”
“Have you heard of the art of kintsugi?” Hannah shook her head. “In Japan, when a piece of pottery breaks, the pieces are put back together using gold at the cracks,” Natalie said. “That way the broken object is even more beautiful than the original.”
There was power in claiming—deliberately and with joy—a part of you that others wanted you to hate yourself for. Hannah feared a time would come when the mezuzah would be used against her and other Jews, but for now, it was one more way of owning her own humanity.
Althea let it all wash over her, and thought, SA. The Sturmabteilung. The storm division, the storm troopers. That was the more formal name for the brownshirts who were such a ubiquitous presence on the streets. There were also the SS, or the blackshirts, who acted more as bodyguards to Hitler and his top officials. But the SA were the ones who Althea saw the most.
“Don’t let the propaganda fool you, dove. The fervor for Hitler is not quite as ferocious as the Nazis would have you believe. There are plenty of people who hold their noses and work with him regardless.”
“‘When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humor and ships at sea by night—there’s all heaven and earth in a book.’”
whenever she began questioning the Nazis, Diedrich shifted them into romance. A kiss, a hand on her lower back, a whisper, a tease. He was charming, naturally, but he acted like a lover only when he wanted to control her.
Since Althea had arrived in Berlin, she had been in bed with monsters. She had been used by them, put on display as an example of the accomplishments of the master race.
“Please, you are no worse than every country in the world, no different than every leader who sees Hitler as a fringe lunatic who lucked into power,” Hannah said, and Otto hoisted his glass in what looked like agreement. “The evil should be all the more apparent to them, yet they refuse to look at it and see it for what it is. I don’t blame you.”
Hannah inhaled then leaned forward, like she was about to tell a secret. “Right now? You’re making this all about you. It’s not about you. It’s about a dictator who wants to kill every non-Aryan in the world. And please believe me, if he somehow accomplishes that horrific feat, he will move on to killing Aryans with brown eyes, and then ones with too-long fingers or crooked teeth.” She paused, exhaled. “This is not about you.”
The New York Post’s book editor mused that the change might have been down to the fact that Althea had spent six months in 1932 and 1933 as a guest of Joseph Goebbels and his initiative to bring authors to Germany for residencies to show off the successes of the master race.
The success of the ASEs proved that sharing the secret was so much
more powerful than hoarding it close to her chest. In doing so, the thread of humanity that ran between all of them tightened, strengthened, became all the more vibrant for the worlds and emotions and journeys that every reader experienced together.
Even in the darkest days, in their deepest grief, at their most exhausted, humans found a way to create moments that were so fundamentally hopeful that they couldn’t help but inspire you to take one more step forward. And then one more.
Tomorrow would come, it always did. And with it, the sorrow they’d so carefully pushed away tonight. Maybe the reprieve felt small given the enormity of what they were all coping with. But it felt similar to how Viv viewed the reprieve the ASEs must give the soldiers. A small reminder that life wasn’t just blood and bombs and fear. And if they could all hold on to those reminders, if they could help each other create them, maybe together they would be able to make it through this godforsaken war. Not necessarily whole, but human.
niggled at her, the curious and practical part of her
I don't like this word choice
She couldn’t help but think of Heinrich Heine’s prediction. Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.
Althea nearly dropped to her knees at the sight of the pyre. It roared into the night sky, an angry lion consuming everything it was fed. And it was fed well. Piles of books were stacked in what seemed like every inch of the square. Students rolled in wheelbarrows full, young people came bearing sacks that strained at the seams, cars’ trunks stood open as volumes spilled out onto the pavement. It was not just a few books, not just a symbolic fire. There were thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books being tossed into the flames.
I can't help but think that much of this excitement was fueled by some people who didnt enjoy reading books of any kind or by people who were mostly illiterate
A light rain had started to fall as if God himself was crying over the atrocity.
“No to decadence and moral corruption,” Goebbels yelled from the podium. He spoke of the death to Jewish intellectualism,
This wasn’t just some pointless rally, this wasn’t just people whipped up into a frothing roar because of mostly empty words spoken by a strong orator. This was the gleeful destruction of knowledge, of science, of poetry, of love. The students who should have cherished such things were giddy as they watched all of it burn.
“You think this is noble? Just?” Althea waved back to the spectacle. “You think this is anything but small-minded men doing their best impression of tyrants? You are nothing but incurious bullies and history will judge you as bigoted, intolerant barbarians.”
