On a bronze plaque next to the monument to the burned books on Berlin's Bebelplatz is a prophetic quote from Heinrich Heine's tragedy "Almanzor": "This was only a prelude, where books are burned, people are subsequently burned"*
The monument was created in 1995 by Israeli sculptor and architect Micha Ulman as a reminder of the events that took place at this site on May 10, 1933.
Under the leadership of Goebbels, Nazi-minded students of Humboldt University, members of the Student Union, carried out the first book burning here – more than 20 thousand volumes of works by “enemies of the German spirit”: Brecht and Freud, Remarque and Mann, Hasek and Meyrink, Tucholsky and Kästner, Babel and Zoshchenko, Lenin, Stalin and Marx, Einstein and Heine himself, and many others.
Bonfires of books blazed throughout Germany and continued until October 1933, accompanied by orchestral music, songs and party chants.
Under the glass slab, empty white book shelves go deep underground – they could have held about twenty thousand books – that’s how many were destroyed by the Nazis on May 10. And the burning of books really did become a prologue to the destruction of millions of human lives.
To paraphrase Heine in relation to today's situation - those who ban books and their authors in Russia - are also killing people. Many of the books presented at the fair can only be published outside of Russia today, their authors have been declared foreign agents or are wanted.
The aim of the Berlin Bebelplatz fair is to counter book bans.
The fair should present and bring to public discussion uncensored Russian-language texts that arose as a response to aggression, violence, disorientation, as a way to rethink the past that led to the war;
texts related to human rights activities and the fate of political prisoners;
with an understanding of the problems of forced emigration;
texts that fight to save the image of man and free thinking.
The fair is intended to show that the Russian language today is not only the language of state propaganda and should not be appropriated by it. It remains the language of a living literary process outside of Russia, without internal and external censorship, a part of world literary life and the most important instrument for understanding the contemporary historical situation.
The fair should help authors, publishers, and critics to do their professional work, and readers to read, thereby preserving the space of uncensored Russian-language book culture, providing an opportunity for free expression, creating a situation of active communication, exchange of information and ideas.
The fair can connect all the waves of cultural emigration and reflect the processes of today's "tamizdat", its language, trends and themes.
Berlin, once a popular haven for Russian intellectuals in the twentieth century, is today remembering its significant Russian past and giving new refugees of the twenty-first century a sense of this continuity and a surprising sense of belonging in the local cultural space.
*“Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort, wo man Bücher // Verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen” Heinrich Heine, “Almansor”, 1821
