GERMANY: Oh, Century!

In the great square before Berlin University the new barbarians screamed "Down with un-German trash and smut!" Brownshirted students paraded by torch light, singing the Horst Wessel Lied. At midnight, May 10, 1933, when they lighted a bonfire of 20,000 books, as "subversions that strike at the root of German thought," Joseph Goebbels rhapsodized:

"These flames . . . light up the new era. . . . Spirits are awakening, and oh, century, it is a joy to live!"

A Matter of Degree. Last week, Berlin's new anti-Nazi municipal government decreed a "literary cleanup." It proposed to ban from the city's libraries and bookshelves three categories of Nazi propaganda: I) the entire output of 63 publishers; 2) all the works of certain authors (Historical Novelist Bruno Brehm, Historian Werner Beumelburg) ; 3) specific books (like Hans Fallada's Iron Gustav, Hans Grimm's People Without Room}.

Prime movers in the new book "cleanup" were the Russians. The British and Americans had objections in practice, but not in principle. They favored a ban "only on books containing I) Nazi, pan-German, militaristic, racial or anti-democratic ideas; 2) material tending to create popular unrest, undermine the Allied military government or divide the United Nations.

It was not quite like Goebbels' book-burning; but yet it was quite like it.