Bebelplatz

On 10 May 1933, the Bücherverbrennungen—the book burnings orchestrated by the Nazi regime—began in Bebelplatz in Berlin. Fabio Stassi sets out on a journey through Germany, visiting the places where thousands of books were thrown into the fires. This was under the orders of Goebbels, who summed up his vision with the chilling declaration: “The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character.” Stassi’s narrative does not just look at Nazi Germany, but back through time to uncover the many historical instances when books were declared enemies of power and, for this reason, were banned, censored, burnt or otherwise destroyed. From the most ancient examples, such as the burning of the library in Thebes and the destruction of Chinese historical and philosophical classics under the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, as Elias Canetti recalls in his Auto da Fé, to the censorship enacted by Pinochet following the coup d’état in Chile, and on to more recent horrors, like the destruction of the library of Mosul by ISIS. Stassi also examines which Italian authors were blacklisted by the Nazis. Setting aside politicians and little-known figures, he focuses on five writers in particular: Piero Aretino, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Emilio Salgari, Ignazio Silone, and Maria Assunta Giulia Volpi. What made their works so dangerous as to warrant burning? In his search for an answer, Stassi finds a number of themes that would have been dangerous for the regime: anti-imperialism, anti-Fascism, cosmopolitanism, Renaissance ideals of individual liberty, and female independence. This is a powerful reflection on the fraught relationship between culture and power, on the enduring strength of books to resist authoritarianism, and on the written word as a weapon against the manipulation of history and the silencing of free expression.

Bebelplatz. La notte dei libri bruciati
Fabio Stassi
Sellerio, 2024