As the marchers approached the pyre to throw more books onto the blaze, Mildred felt a cold, sickening shiver run up her spine as tens of thousands of voices began chanting a litany of Fire Oaths—first, the offense against German language and literature; next, what must succeed it; and last, the author to be consigned to oblivion. “Against class struggle and materialism,” they chanted. “For national community and an idealistic way of life. Marx and Kautsky!”
An earsplitting roar followed as the men’s books were thrown onto the pyre.
“Against decadence and moral decay. For discipline and decency in family and state. Mann, Glaeser, and Kästner!”
The acrid smoke stung Mildred’s eyes and her breath caught in her throat. So many works by authors she respected and admired, whose brilliant words she taught to her students. Erich Remarque’s autobiographical novel of the Great War, All Quiet on the Western Front. Works by Theodor Wolff and Georg Bernhard. For their corrupting foreign influence, Ernest Hemingway and Jack London. For pacifism, for advocating for the disabled, for seeking better conditions for workers and women’s rights, Helen Keller.
Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels addressed the crowd from a podium draped with a swastika banner, his usually resonant tenor raspy from smoke or overuse. “The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism has come to an end, and the German revolution has again opened the way for the true essence of being German,” he declaimed, each word precisely enunciated. “Over the past fourteen years, you students have had to suffer in silent shame the humiliations of the Weimar Republic. Your libraries were inundated with the trash and filth of Jewish literati. The old past lies in flames. The new times will arise from the flame that burns in our hearts!”
On and on he went, stirring the crowd into a frenzy of exultant anger. Clasping Arvid’s hand so tightly her fingers ached, Mildred watched, horrified and dismayed, as the most cherished works of some of the world’s most celebrated authors turned to ash and smoke.
Then, a jolt of recognition so sharp it left her breathless.
Among the marchers, clad in SA brown, one of her former students filed past, not two feet from where she stood. His gaze fixed ardently upon the towering pyre, he did not recognize her, but she knew him, and she knew the book tucked under his arm—a collection of plays by the renowned nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine, a German Jew.
As she watched him march off to destroy the book, Mildred knew that at universities throughout Germany, other disgruntled, angry, vengeful students were destroying the very books that could teach them that this was wrong, that this would create nothing but ash and loss. It would not bring them joy, or find them work, or fill their bellies. It would not erase the wisdom that resonated from the author’s mind to the reader’s heart.
As flame and smoke rose to the sky, a line from Heine’s play Almansor drifted into her thoughts: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.”
Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people.
Chapter Fifteen
May 1933
Greta
Greta did not respond to Adam’s note to tell him she was returning to Germany. She was not entirely sure why. Perhaps she did not want him to think she was coming back for his sake rather than her country’s; fighting the rise of fascism in her homeland was more important to her than their ill-fated romance. Perhaps she wanted the option to change her mind if she decided at the last minute that she could not see him.
She arrived in Frankfurt am Main two days after tens of thousands of books had gone up in flames in city squares throughout Germany. Students from the Universität Frankfurt had staged their own cleansing by fire in Römerberg in front of city hall. By the time Greta passed through the square, the pile of ash was gone, cleared away by rain or an assiduous street sweeper. Somehow it seemed that the stink of burning lingered, like a ghost from the past or a foreboding vision of the future.
Before setting out from Dover, she had bought a newspaper at a stand near the pier. On the front page was an open letter to the Student Body of Germany from Helen Keller, the famous blind and deaf American author and advocate. “History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas,” she had written. “Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas