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.
Inspired by Goebbels' speech, Nazi-minded students of the University of Berlin (the future Humboldt Brothers University), members of the Student Union, held a demonstrative 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 burned across Germany from March to November 1933, accompanied by orchestral music, songs, and party chants.
Beneath the glass slab, empty white bookcases stretch deep underground—they could have held around twenty thousand books—the number destroyed by the Nazis on May 10th. And the book burning truly became the 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 aims to help authors, publishers, and critics pursue their professional work, and readers read, thereby preserving the space for uncensored Russian-language book culture, providing opportunities for free expression, and creating a climate of active communication and the 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, a popular haven for Russian intellectuals in the twentieth century, is today recalling its significant Russian past and allowing new refugees of the twenty-first century to experience this continuity and, in a surprising way, feel like they belong 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
Photo https://marfa-nikitina4.livejournal.com/1478533.html
