In the summer of 1933, a few months after the burning of the Reichstag, Germany’s ruling Nazi Party organised burnings of ‘decadent literature’ across the country. Fishburn contends that ‘public book burning is always primarily a symbolic act, a cross between legislation and advertising’. Many of the bonfires were conducted by university students and staff: ‘far from being a spontaneous outburst, the fires were the result of meticulous planning … a theatrical break with the past’, in conscious imitation of Luther’s burning of a papal bull in 1520.

German librarian Dr Friedrich Schönemann, visiting the United States in 1933, explained the fires as a counter-attack against the ‘tremendous flood of books on nudism and of a generally pornographic nature’. The censors who had a few years earlier provoked Upton Sinclair into parading through Boston reading aloud obscene passages from Shakespeare and the Bible (he had great fun with Genesis 19:30–38) would have approved Schönemann’s arguments. English philosopher C.E.M. Joad also defended book burning in terms very similar to Schönemann’s. Appalled by the lurid pulps (‘jackets upon which girls struggled in the grip of clutching fingers, trembled before Chinamen, or writhed in the coil of snakes’) in his hospital library, Joad organised a ceremonial burning. Having ‘purified’ the library, he ‘proceeded contentedly to read George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Dickens and Trollope’. The crucial differences are that Joad did not have the government behind him, and never graduated to incinerating people.

The activities of Reich Leader Alfred Rosenberg demonstrate that collection building can be every bit as destructive as throwing books onto a fire. In an attempt to become the ‘final custodian’ of Jewish culture, Rosenberg directed the systematic looting of Jewish collections across Europe. Between 1940 and 1943 Rosenberg assembled a collection of 550,000 books, whose ultimate purpose was to demonstrate that the destruction of the culture that had created them ‘was necessary and fitting’. In Eastern Europe, more than two thousand cultural institutions were ransacked, with the pillaged collections ultimately numbering in the millions.

Millions of German books were lost, too: by bombardment, by looting (including Hitler’s bunker), and as part of the denazificiation process. There were many private disposals of one title in particular: ‘Hoping neither to attract the attention of any rabidly pro-Nazi figures still in local government, or to have the incriminating book on their hands when the Allied armies arrived, Mein Kampf was often quietly burned or buried.’

German publishing, however, recovered from the devastation of the war with extraordinary speed. By 1948 there were 427 firms, and new titles often sold out prior to publication. In the bookshops, ‘small clusters of obvious Allied propaganda were dispersed through piles of tired stock, the sorry result of “exhuming remainders of books” that had been prewar publishing failures’. The remarkable thing, given the scale of the carnage across Europe, is that so much dross escaped both deliberate and accidental damage. The irony is that libraries were not ‘given much priority in the evolving plans for cultural restitution, which is especially curious given the importance of books in Allied propaganda and public debate’. The Allied officers tasked with attempting restitution faced an impossible task. In many cases, returning the books whence they had come would have heaped wrong on wrong: the institutions had been obliterated, and so had the societies that had built them. As Alfred Kantorowicz (a German exile who in 1934 founded a Library of the Burned Books in Paris) observed, talking about the effects of censorship rather than genocide, ‘The books might survive … but the society that could understand them could be annihilated’.

This absorbing book will shake your ideas about the meaning of destruction and retention. All things must pass. Books are destroyed every day, for reasons that make perfect sense to the destroyer. Fishburn himself notes that Burning Books ‘is printed on paper suitable for recycling’, and, emulating Lord Byron, proposes to ‘light his pipe with it, beyond the Bosphorus’.