Book Burning: A Brief History of Bibliocide

The mere thought of setting fire to books is enough to ignite rage in most book lovers’ hearts. If you’ve seen images of book burnings in Nazi Germany, for example, you know the disgusted feeling such photos elicit, even though those acts represent the least of their perpetrators’ atrocities.

But why are books even burned to begin with? How is it that burning words on paper has become a symbol for intolerance and hatred?

In this post, we’ll explore the history of book burning and the various reasons why books have been destroyed on a wide scale.

Why Did Book Burning Start?

When you think of book burning, images of Nazi Germany and destruction of the Fahrenheit 451 variety probably come to mind first. And indeed, that era marks one of the worst and most memorable campaigns of book burning that was orchestrated as a means of Nazi propaganda.

But that was far from the first—or last—time that books, artifacts, and other stores of knowledge were intentionally destroyed. Throughout history, books have been burned or destroyed for purposes of war, vanity, and authoritarian control, to name just a few.

A Brief History of Book Burning

The following is a brief history of book burning. Note that this is not an exhaustive list of every incident of book burning, but our intention is to look at the various reasons that books have been destroyed at pivotal points in history.

China (213 BC)

In 213 BC, Emperor Shih Huang Ti of China was convinced that by burning all the documents and written records in his empire, he could make history begin with him.

This was on the advice of his chief adviser, who told the emperor that book burning would prevent scholars from comparing his reign to the past. However, books on astrology, agriculture, medicine, and the history of the Qin state were spared.

Rome (186 BC)

In 186 BC, the Roman senate banned the Bacchanalia, or festivals celebrating the god of wine, Bacchus. These festivals had been adopted from the then-Greek parts of southern Italy.

In addition to banning the rituals, several rulers ordered that books containing details of such celebrations be outlawed and burned to “prevent disorder and the spread of foreign customs.” This was supposedly to protect Roman culture from outside influences.

Baghdad (1258)

When the Mongols ransacked Baghdad in 1258, some 800,000 people were killed, and just as many books were likely destroyed.

Abdulsalem Abdulkareem, a librarian at the al-Qadiriyya library in Baghdad, has said that various libraries were burned, and the waters of the Tigris “ran black with ink from all the destroyed books.” Only a handful of books were successfully recovered from the river.

Invention of the Printing Press (1440)

Let’s fast-forward now to a pivotal moment in the production of books: Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1440.

This innovation made it easier to copy and produce books much more quickly, and therefore produce more books and disseminate information more easily. It’s thanks to the printing press that most western households came to acquire at least one book (usually a bible).

Although printed manuscripts decreased in monetary value as a result of the printing press, people who now had access to books for the first time came to realize the immense power of information and knowledge.

So it’s from this point that book burnings became more symbolic. Although the destruction of books had happened occasionally throughout history, the masses had been generally unaware of such events or their implications. Now that the intellectual value of books was known, destroying them also became a more powerful gesture.

Luther and the Reformation (1520)

After being excommunicated by the Catholic church, Protestant reformer Martin Luther led a public burning of books in a public square in Wittenberg. Along with the Papal Bull of Excommunication, other works that Luther considered symbols of Catholic orthodoxy were also burned.

In 1521, in the Habsburg Netherlands, Emperor Charles V published a ban on any books, sermons, and writings by Luther or his followers.

Mass book burnings began to take place in Utrecht, Amsterdam, and other towns throughout the Netherlands. Later, Anabaptist and Calvinist writings would also be burned, and many printers and sellers of Protestant works were themselves burned at the stake during the Inquisition. Yet, Protestant writings continued to spread.

Now, before we move on to one of the most well-known examples of mass book burning, let’s look at a case that’s closely related by jumping forward to 1817.

For the 300th anniversary of Martin Luther’s launching of the Reformation, students in Germany held a burning of “Un-German” books.

By this point, as we’ve already touched on, books were in much greater circulation than ever before, so the thought of actually restricting what people know or could know seemed unrealistic.

According to Matthew Fishburn, author of Burning Books, this could be why it took the rest of the world so long to realize what the Nazis were actually up to and capable of when they began their campaigns of book burning just a century later.

Nazi Germany (1930s)

In Nazi Germany and Austria, book burnings began in the 1930s as a campaign conducted by the German Student Union (the DSt).

Books that were considered subversive or representative of ideologies opposing Nazism were the most targeted, including works by Jewish and leftist writers such as Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud and Upton Sinclair. The first books burned were by Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky.

The DSt contacted an official from the Propaganda Ministry to request support for their campaign, and book burnings became highly publicized events that were broadcast on live radio, along with speeches and songs.

When complicit German students ran out of books to burn in their own libraries, they would turn to independent bookstores. Libraries were also asked to destroy anything that did not stand up to Hitler’s standards.

Book Burning in the United States

During the “red scare” of the 1950s, many Americans, spurred on by Senator Joseph McCarthy, began burning and destroying books that were perceived as being procommunist.

Of course, books and authors weren’t the only victims–many people in the entertainment industry were also “blacklisted” during this time.

It was also in 1953 that Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 was published. Bradbury had said that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 because of his concerns regarding book burning during the McCarthy era.

The 21st Century

More recent examples of book burning include an organized burning of the Koran, planned by a small Florida church in 2010 to mark the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

In 2015, across the world in Mosul, ISIS burned books from the city’s library as a demonstration of ideological and territorial conquest.

Both are examples of ignorance and intolerance, which have been at the root of most book burnings throughout history.

Implications of Book Burning

Whether it happens on a small or large scale, book burning and the symbolic destruction of ideas is one (unfortunate) way to get attention, and often send messages of intolerance, hate, and even violence.

However, as the author of this Smithsonian article points out, there’s something else book burners throughout history generally have in common: “The unifying factor between all types of purposeful book-burners in the 20th century is that the perpetrators feel like victims, even if they’re the ones in power.”

But with most information now published digitally, is there anything left for those in “fear” to burn?

While the general public can’t go around burning what’s on the Internet, new questions regarding censorship and what companies like Twitter or Facebook have the right to remove have fueled spirited and important discussions about freedom of speech in the digital age—but that’s a topic for another post.

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