Commemorating the book burnings after 1945

This situation did not change until the second half of the 1970s as part of a general process of change in the culture of remembrance. In 1977, the journalist Jürgen Serke published a series of articles about the book burnings in the magazine Stern. As this was the first extensive examination of the book burnings ever to be published, it aroused great public interest, and the articles were later reissued as a book. A year later, the Association of German Writers and the German P.E.N. Center declared May 10 “Book Day” in commemoration of May 10, 1933. In 1979, with the support of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, the day of remembrance attracted nationwide interest.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the book burnings in 1983, a number of German cities staged commemorative events and exhibitions, and a number of new publications about the book burnings were issued. The following year, the first permanent commemorative plaque was put up in Göttingen. The first memorial was installed in Hamburg in 1985. Between then and 2000 a number of other cities followed suit, including Berlin (1995) and Cologne (1998).

In Munich the municipal library in the district of Sendling marked the fiftieth anniversary of the book burnings in 1983 with an exhibition of 125 books from the Library of Burned Books owned by the collector Georg P. Salzmann. Although the exhibition was the first of its kind, it received little attention. On the next round anniversary, in 1993, the Institute of German Philology at Ludwig Maximilian University presented an exhibition entitled 60 Years after the Book Burnings, including an accompanying book.

Two years after that, the artist Wolfram P. Kastner burned a circle into the lawn on Königsplatz on the site of the 1933 book burnings. Kastner’s commemorative action was initially rejected and he only received approval after a long struggle with the responsible city authorities, on condition that the circle was temporary. His idea of preserving this charred circle and having an information board put up next to it as a permanent memorial so as “not to allow grass to grow over the matter,” was rejected by the Munich city administration. The information board was removed the following February and grass was allowed to grow over the circle. In the years that followed, Kastner initially was refused permission to repeat his art action. Only in 2004 was he allowed to perform it again. Since then he has repeated it several times. He and a number of committed Munich citizens also established an annual reading under the title Munich Reads – from Burned Books. In the meantime this has become an established event that takes place every May 10 on Königsplatz with the participation of many institutions and persons from civil society.