Next May 10 marks the 90th anniversary of one of the inaugural and most atrocious episodes of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany: the festive and maddening burning, throughout the country, of thousands of books by authors considered perverse and harmful, enemies of the people. and of the German spirit, foreigners even in their own language, usurpers, spreaders of the worst evils that could be under the sun: Judaism, anarchy, communism.
Like an announcement of what would come next, the flames burned that day in squares and universities, its voracious shadow began to cover everything, towers of smoke rose in the manner of a terrifying atonement, an auto da fe. The worst thing is that the crowd was contemplating the spectacle in ecstasy; His eyes already reflected the fire of that hell that was just beginning but that very soon was going to take over a town that was perhaps the most educated in Europe.
That is the most serious thing, that by that time ‘National Socialism’ had ceased to be a minority and violent movement and had become not only the basis of the new government but also a sinister mass phenomenon. Since January 30, 1933, when Hitler was called to be chancellor of the Weimar Republic, a republic that also kept the old name of the empire it replaced, the German Empire, luck was written.
How was such a catastrophe possible? How could the German people reach that degree of alienation and barbarism? The answer, of course, is not easy nor is it a single one; it never is in history, much less in a subject on which all the possible hypotheses have been conjectured from the first day, perhaps with the idea that in some of them there is also the certainty, the hope, that this horror will not will never be repeated.
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Although there are some clues to try to understand the origins of Nazism, some keys are already very clear. For example, that of the humiliation of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles: the brutality with which France, taking revenge for the defeat in the war of 1870, made the surrender of the Empire, in 1918, an opportunity to isolate and debase it, ruin it, extinguish it. And she succeeded: from that moment on the German people were doomed to the abyss.
But there was also a phenomenon that went beyond the outcome of the war, as if in reality everyone had lost the war, which is what usually happens in wars. Because in the end what prevailed, after the disaster and the end of the world, was discouragement, hopelessness, the anguish of all those peoples who went out to fight for their homeland and returned dead and blinded, mutilated, dejected.
To this we must add the ravages of the so-called ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic: a plague that was the worst epilogue of the war, and no less lethal, since many of those who survived the trenches, with great difficulty, returned to his house to die sweating and coughing in a bed, waiting, like the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, for that bottle of turpentine that never arrived and that Picasso was carrying in his hands in a hurry.
War and plague were the breeding ground for demagogy and totalitarianism; In the ruins of the old world, like larvae, grew the messianic discourse and the contempt for the constitutional order, the strident and easy answers to very complex problems, the idea that violence in the streets, ‘direct action’, was the only effective response to these times of crisis. So it was in Russia with Bolshevism, so it was in Italy with fascism.
But in Germany there was an additional, much more serious ingredient: on the one hand, the nostalgia for empire, the desperate need to explain how the greatest military and economic power in Europe could have lost the war; on the other hand, anti-Semitism, the deaf and secret current, increasingly evident and shameless, of hatred of the Jews as responsible for all the evils that had befallen the German people.
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In January 1923—just ten years before Hitler came to power, that’s where his slow march on Berlin began—the French invaded the Ruhr basin, a stronghold of German industry, to reclaim unpaid war debts. . The mark, already a flimsy currency and in intensive care, collapsed when the government decided to issue without control. Millions of those bills that were no longer worth anything were paid for one dollar.
It was then, at the end of that fateful 1923, when Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, decided that he had to take action and stage a coup as his idol Benito Mussolini had done a year ago in Italy. . The idea was to unite Bavarian separatists with their paramilitary group of thugs who hated Jews and communists alike, and march from Munich to Berlin to seize power.
Hitler, a mediocre Austrian painter who had fought in the war under the German flag, an obscure corporal wounded several times on the Western Front, had been wandering the streets of Bavaria since 1919 muttering his fury and resentment. Around that time he joined the National Socialist party and very soon revealed himself as its great leader and orator, its best and most charismatic ideologue, delving into the premises of hatred of the Jews and Marxists.
The ‘Nazi’ model (that was the nickname of the National Socialists) was the same as that of Italian fascism: shock groups in the streets, the fearsome SA; the claim of violence as one of the legitimate expressions of politics; the glorification of squadronism and the symbols of paramilitary culture; contempt for liberal democracy and state institutions; the party as the embodiment of a superior ideal of the human.
But unlike fascism, which was an operetta movement, Nazism had a much deeper cultural substratum in ethnic doctrine and the perverse idea of the superiority of the ‘Aryan race’. From there, and fishing in the troubled river of chaos and crisis, Hitler launched himself in November 1923 to seize power. And though he failed miserably, his wild attempt earned him the status of becoming a national figure.
It was already the days of the radio and all the microphones were opened to the grotesque führer so that he could disseminate his ideas, his delusions without restraint. Instead of continuing on the coup path, Nazism was now going to conquer the German people in the streets and at the polls. Without abandoning violence, of course not. But the path of persuasion was ready so that, whatever the cost, one day the nation would merge with the only movement that truly represented it.
The problem is that Germany had already come out of the crisis and since 1924 there had been a furor similar to that of the days before the war. Bohemia and debauchery, consumerism and promiscuity, the splendor of art, music and literature had once again made Berlin the capital of the world: the “new Babylon”, as it was then called. That was also what the Nazis were against, all forms of happiness.
But in 1929 the bankruptcy of the world came, the United States went bankrupt and loans to Germany ceased. The illusion of opulence of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ exploded into a thousand pieces, like the glittering mirror that it was, and once again hatred and frustration, poverty, unemployment, and the lethargy of the ruling classes returned. It was the moment of grace for Nazism, the blow that Hitler had been waiting for and plotting for years.
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In each new election, since 1928, the Nazi party only grew. More and more Germans were coming closer to his violent and absurd doctrines, his dark utopia of horror. At the end of 1932, faced with a new crisis, the establishment had to surrender and it was evident that power had to be given to Hitler. The idea was to seat him on the throne and control him, sate his ambition but also make him the puppet of elite interests.
How naive: on January 30, 1933, the dictatorship began, with its dizzying barrage of unstoppable events: on February 27, the Nazis burned parliament and blamed the communists to declare a state of emergency; on March 24 the ‘enabling law’ was signed, a ploy to give all the repressive and police power to the government; April 1st was the first major, albeit unsuccessful, boycott against Jewish businesses.
But the true face of horror, its darkest announcement, was seen on May 10 with the burning of the books. Because that was not an initiative of the government but of its supporters and, what is worse, of its aulicos in the universities. As Víctor Klemperer, one of his victims, described it masterfully and disconsolately, Nazism was not a political doctrine but a pagan and messianic religion; it was not (is not) a way of thinking but a way of being.
And a way of being that had unleashed the worst demons of German culture, all its abysses. That was the fire that was reflected in the faces of the thousands of attendees, happy, insane, before that bonfire in which the greatest names in literature from the Weimar Republic burned: Heinrich Mann, María Leither, Alfred Kerr, Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Maria Remarque, Jacob Wassermann, Lisa Tetzner and many more.
In 1820 the great German poet Heinrich Heine, of Jewish origin, wrote a tragedy in verse about the capture of Granada in 1492 by the Catholic Monarchs. His name is Almanzor and in it one of his characters, Hasán, utters a prophetic and shocking phrase when he is told that in the city square the Castilians are burning the Koran: “It is only the prelude: wherever they burn books they will end up burning people. ..”, he says laconically.
It is the same phrase that is on a commemorative plaque in Bebel Square in the center of Berlin, where on May 10, 1933, ninety years ago, one of the largest book burnings at the hands of the Nazis took place. It is a painful evocation but also a warning, so that never again, hopefully, the horror will be repeated.
JUAN ESTEBAN CONSTAIN
For the time
(Read all the columns by Juan Esteban Constaín here)
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