Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack by Richard Ovenden

Author:Richard Ovenden [Ovenden, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: 0674241207
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2020-08-07T23:00:00+00:00

Esau coming back from the hunt, and Jacob’s ladder. From the Sarajevo Haggadah, c.1350.

10

Sarajevo Mon Amour

ON THE EVENING of 25 August 1992 shells began to rain down on a building in Bosnia’s capital city of Sarajevo, the infamous site of the assassination that triggered the First World War. These were not ordinary shells and the building was not an ordinary structure. The shells were incendiaries, designed to raise fire rapidly on impact, especially when surrounded by combustible material. The building they hit was the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the shells were fired by the Serbian militia who had surrounded the city as part of the strategy of the Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević, to destroy Bosnia.

The Serbs then placed marksmen to pick off the firefighters and even used anti-aircraft guns turned not toward the skies but horizontally. The staff of the library formed a human chain to remove materials from the burning structure but the relentless shelling and sniper fire made it too dangerous for all but a few of the rare books to be saved. At around 2 p.m. that day one member of the library’s staff, Aida Buturović, was shot by a sniper.1 She had been a talented linguist working to support the collaborative network of libraries in the country. She was only thirty years old and joined a casualty list of 14 deaths and 126 wounded from that day in Sarajevo.2

The writer Ray Bradbury reminded us in 1953 of the temperature at which paper burns – Fahrenheit 451 – but an entire library takes a long time to be destroyed. The ash from the burnt volumes fell on the city over subsequent days like ‘black birds’, in the words of Bosnian poet and writer Valerijan Žujo.3

Although the motivations for destroying libraries and archives vary from case to case the erasure of a particular culture has featured prominently. The book ravages of the European Reformation had a strong religious flavour to them and there is a sense that Catholic communities were targeted by the destruction of their libraries, as the content of those libraries was regarded as heretical. The destruction of Louvain University Library had a cultural component too with its national status as a centre of knowledge. The attacks on libraries and archives during the Holocaust were a cultural assault in its broadest sense: it was not merely the religion of the Jews that the Nazi machine sought to eradicate but all aspects of Jewish existence: from living beings to the gravestones of their ancestors.

The National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was situated in a building known locally as Vijećnica (City Hall). It housed over 1.5 million books, manuscripts, maps, photographs and other materials. Together these provided the recorded memory not just of a nation but the culture of an entire region, one that had a significant Muslim population. The shells that struck the building did not do so by chance. The library was not accidentally caught in the crossfire of a regional

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