Victor Grossman
May 5, 2024
No books were
burned this time in early May. But there were ironic parallels, some all too
alarming!
It was May 10th
in Germany’s terrible year 1933, Hitler had been in power for hardly three
months, when students and staff emptied the university libraries of forbidden
books and threw them, an estimated 20,000 books by over a hundred authors, into
the flames of a giant bonfire. Most authors were German—Jewish, atheist,
liberal, leftist, Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers, Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld, but also some foreign
works were thrown into the flames—Maxim Gorki, Hemingway, Jack London, Dos
Passos.
Ninety-one years
later, this May 3rd, just across Berlin’s famous Unter den Linden boulevard and
in the same university courtyard where those books had once been dragged from,
some of today’s students—courageous, determined, the total opposite of the Nazis
of 1933—were forcibly hauled away to waiting police vans. The students of 1933
were advocating murder, preparing for the genocide which was to follow. These
students of 2024 are protesting against murder and genocide.
The mayor, the
authorities claimed that forbidden Hamas slogans were called out, justifying
their brutal cuffing and arrests. It is possible that some Arab participants,
emotionally moved by news and the pictures from Gaza, may have generalized
these feelings. Who knows? And does it matter? This group was not anti-Semitic;
it also included Jewish students, a few of them Israeli exiles. The spirit of
these first three hundred demonstrators, as in similar scenes at other colleges
and universities in Germany and other countries—and so very courageously all
over the U.S.A.—was directed against destruction worse than any since 1945, of
homes, mosques, churches, libraries, schools and universities in Gaza and
against the killing of over 35,000 human beings, a majority of them women and
children, and the physical and psychical maiming of so many more.
But these
demonstrations, now growing rapidly in number, were more than that. For many
they also expressed protest at the entire scene now engulfing Germany, and not
only Germany. Hatred is in the air, with century-old feelings of superiority
over “inferior” people, growing pressure to build ever more destructive weapons
and prepare to use them—always, of course “in justified self-defense,” whether
in Gaza, in Lithuania, Estonia or for blockades against human beings at
frontiers in Texas, Arizona or along Mediterranean seashores. And with this
hatred there were mounting pressures for conformity. Don’t rock the boat—or
else! Such trends are gaining strength, aiming at the accession of total power,
and not only with the obviously far-right groups! For so many of the proper,
accepted leaders have ties with the billionaire profiteers thrilling at new
conflicts and more mansions, jets, yachts.
It is the new
spirit of protest against these trends, the hunt for new answers, which has
dominant circles worried, even fearsome. That is why they send police into
Hind’s Hall or the courtyard of Humboldt University. Sometimes they prevail and
can break resistance, sometimes local victories can be won. But it is the
long-awaited movement which counts, and its match-up with equally courageous
workers at auto plants, at Walmart or Starbuck shops or in Central Africa and
Central America.
There is an
added irony; the site of Friday’s protest was the courtyard of Humboldt
University in East Berlin, given that name soon after the defeat of the Nazis
and the liberation of Berlin by the Red Army on May 8th 1945. Looking down upon
today’s fighters is the statue of
Alexander von Humboldt, a great scientist and explorer, who ardently
opposed the slavery he saw in Latin America and the U.S.A. in the 1820s—and
oppression everywhere. A worthy patron. And inside the handsome building (where
Albert Einstein once taught)and despite many changes in the university’s
character over the years, one sentence has been saved, in golden letters above
a wide central staircase. It was written by another famous man, who once
studied here, and it might also be considered as very relevant. The author was
none other than Karl Marx. The words were: “Philosophers have hitherto only
interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Perhaps it is fear of the revival of such a spirit which has caused the mayor
and many politicians to become so angry and worried and to send in the
police. Let us hope the better analogies
are models, not the frightening ones!
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