Evening star., 1933-05-11
When Culture Shrieks.

When Gen. Washington's great Po-
lish lieutenant, Gen. Kosciusko, fell
in the War of the Revolution, 1t was
said, in famous tribute to his memory,
that freedom shrieked." Culture
must have shrieked last night, when
superb heated Nah students, in more
than q score OF German university
towns, made ceremonial bonfires OF
"un-German" books. THE process Of
purging German life of Jewish intel
lectualism is now complete" exclaimed
DR.. Goebbels, Chancellor Hitler's min
lister Of enlightenment and propaganda,
as he stood triumphant at the literary
ruins before the University Of Berlin.
1t is difficult for the outside world
to decide whether some of the things
now going on in Hitlerized Germany
should be taken seriously or dismissed
as symptoms OF political paranoia-
alterations destined to disappear when
the Reich's rulers are brought to their
senses. Meantime, nothing that has
happened since the German Fascists
seized power so graphically attests the
extent to which reason has toppled
in the vaunted land of Kultur as the
burning OF "non-Aryan" literature in
public pyres under semi official auspices.
Authors whose thinking has stimu-
lated German thought throughout mod
ern times were put to the torch in
Berlin and other centers Of learning.
They were not all Jews, or even Ger
mans. The books consigned to the
flames of Nazi fury bore names like
Karl Marx, Ferdinand La Sale, Fried
rich Engels, August Bebel, Karl Lieb-
knecht, Kautsky, Bernstein and Wilfer-
ding among the Germans and Austrians.
Lenin, Stain, Zinovieff, Lunacharsky
and Bukharin were among the fired
Russians. Henri 1ichtenberger, the
French philosopher. who has written
sympathetically on Franco re-
lations, went up in smoke along with
American writer's like Jack London,
Helen Keller, Upton Sinclair, Ben
Lindsey, Morris Hillquit and Robert
Carr.
Thomas Mann German Nobel prize
winner, was reduced to ashes with all
the German moderns like Einstein,
Freud. Lion Fuchtwanger, Emil Lud-
wig, Jakob Wa~ermann, Arthur
Schnitzler and Erich Remarque, the
latter the author of "All Quiet on the
Western Front" Bertha Won Suttner,
who won the Nobel prize for litera-
ture by writing the disarmament classic,
Lay Down Your Arms" went the fiery
way with Walther Rathenau. the Ger
man foreign minister, who was assassi-
mated after the war by Nationalist gang
sters, and Hugo Preus, who wrote the
Weimar constitution, which Hitler and
his cohorts destroyed several months
before they burned Its literary creator
In efdgy.
One wonders If, on that inevitable
day when modernism again supplants
medievalism in Germany, the sym
bolic significance" Of book-burning day
as the minister of enlightenment and
propaganda terms it. will be remem-
bered with pride. At such . spectacl:
staged in the name of German culture
there must be many Germans who
stand aghast and are fled with a deer
sense Of shame. They will marvel, al
millions of persons beyond Germany''
borders do, that nation saturated with
boundless pride in its Goethe ano
Schiller could ever have succumbed te
such madness.
The whole episode is incredible ane
incomprehensible. 1t leaves civiizee
mankind amused and amazed.