Information Hunters by Kathy Peiss

Author:Kathy Peiss
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Book Burning—American Style

Even as American libraries expanded their collections through relationships with the military, the American occupation government faced its own problem of mass acquisitions. The Allies had agreed to purge Nazism from German society and culture, including its book world. The military confiscated countless volumes, sequestering and even destroying them. “The circulation of Nazi and militaristic books has been prohibited since the arrival of the Army in Germany,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower observed. Bookstores and publishers had been forced to surrender these works to military authorities. Many objectionable volumes had been swept up in the mass collecting of information and publications undertaken by US Army intelligence, the OSS, and the Library of Congress Mission. Over time, this became a remarkable operation to make an entire body of published works inaccessible and unreadable. In this effort, government officials recruited communications experts, social scientists, and progressive educators, who applied their homegrown experience and research to the unsettled and alien conditions of Germany. Librarians, too, were deeply involved.1

What had seemed a matter internal to the occupation government became the subject of American public uproar when on May 13, 1946, the Allies signed Order No. 4, on the “Confiscation of Literature and Material of a Nazi and Militarist Nature.” It prohibited works that promoted Nazism, fascism, militarism, racism, völkisch ideas, anti-democratic views, and civil disorder. It required schools, universities, and public libraries, as well as booksellers and publishers, to remove these works from their shelves and deliver them to Allied authorities; they would then be “placed at the disposal of the Military Zone commanders for destruction.” American officials must have assumed that Order No. 4, as an extension of earlier policies, would attract little notice when they announced it in Berlin that day. Instead, reporters clamored for explanation and demanded a second briefing. In a hastily organized press conference that night, Vivian Cox, an ex-WAC and low-level assistant in the Armed Forces Division, was called in to address the skeptical crowd. She told them that a single passage could condemn a book and “billions” of volumes might be seized. “Was the order different in principle from Nazi book burnings?” they asked. “No, not in Miss Cox’s opinion,” reported Time. This was a front-page story: Americans were burning books.2

The ensuing tumult at home was brief but pointed. Newspapers, librarians, scholars, and some politicians castigated the occupation authorities for the atrocity of book destruction as “contrary to democratic principles.”3 How could a policy that smacked of Nazism lead the German people to embrace liberal democracy? And just as important, what did it say about American ideals in the aftermath of the war? Separating these questions, the occupation government perceived books and reading to be a danger to the future of Germany, even as it affirmed Americans’ right to read. Its mass acquisitions policy resolved the contradiction by preserving some of these works for research and study while it endeavored to destroy the rest. Not fully evident to American authorities or journalists was how much

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