According to Eric Berkowitz’s Dangerous Ideas, the first public book burning in recorded history likely occurred in 430 BCE. Because the Sophist philosopher Protagoras questioned the existence of the gods, who had inflicted defeats in war and a devastating pestilence on Athens, his fellow citizens wanted to appease them by incinerating his sacrilegious writings.
Two hundred years after Protagoras’s works were devoured by flames, Chinese scrolls and wooden tablets suffered the same fate during the reign of Qin Shi Huang.In Imperial Rome books were burned assiduously, including many Christian texts, and then pagan texts once the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century. A religion “rent by its own internal battles,” Berkowitz writes, required fiery measures to ensure orthodoxy and a unified church, which “became the model for speech suppression for centuries to come.” And so the pyres continued to blaze, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Age, and reaching, shamefully, into our own times.
Fire’s sheer destructiveness and capacity for spectacle make it dear to censors, as exemplified by two of the most infamous cases of book burning in recent centuries. The first comes from the United States, where in 1873 Anthony Comstock persuaded Congress to enact laws making it illegal to send lascivious materials through the mail. As a postal inspector, and with the help of mobs associated with his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock claimed to have burned 160 tons of obscene literary material in the forty-year period following passage of the so-called Comstock laws, as well as illustrated playing cards, sex toys, marriage guides, and abortion and birth control devices.
The second example is the notorious Nazi bonfires in 1933 that turned to cinders and smoke hundreds of thousands of books, including “degenerate” works by Marx, Mann, Proust, and Einstein. Both at the time and subsequently, this was so widely condemned that it seemed no one would dare to repeat it, or at least would not film and display it to the world. And yet in Chile, forty years later, that is exactly what happened after the coup against the democratically elected president Salvador Allende. Watching television in September 1973, I saw soldiers casting books on a smoldering pyre, among which was my own How to Read Donald Duck, an experience that helped convince me, as it has authors over the ages, that it was necessary to go into exile lest I endure the same mistreatment. Heinrich Heine expressed it best in 1823: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.” Eight years later, he went into exile in Paris to escape German censorship.