Heine's book-burning warning stands at Holocaust museums

Person: Heinrich Heine
Lived: 1797–1856
Field: Poetry & prose
From: German

The story

Heinrich Heine was born into a Jewish family in Düsseldorf in 1797 and began writing poetry and plays while still a law student. Between 1821 and 1822 he wrote a tragedy, Almansor, which was published in April 1823 together with a second play, William Ratcliff, and his poem cycle Lyrisches Intermezzo. Neither play had much success on the stage.

Almansor is set in Spain after the Christian conquest of Granada. When the Muslim character Hassan hears that the conquerors have burned the Quran in the city's marketplace, he answers that this was only a prelude: where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well. Heine had a lasting interest in the persecuted minorities of medieval Spain, and as a student in Berlin he was especially drawn to the history of its Jews.

More than a century later, the Nazis made Heine one of their chief targets. Their newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, attacked him repeatedly, even denouncing a Heine memorial completed in Hamburg in 1926. In 1933 his works were among the thousands of books burned on Berlin's Opernplatz. All his monuments in Germany were removed or destroyed, his books were suppressed and, from 1940, banned. Silencing him proved difficult, however, because so many of his poems lived on as popular songs, and a 1937 New York Times article reported that Goebbels had found it impossible in practice to purge his influence from the German language.

Heine's own words were later chosen to mark the site of the Berlin book burning. The line from Almansor, in its original German, is engraved in the ground there. It is also set into the pavement in Frankfurt am Main and is prominently displayed at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem, and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Visitors to these places read a sentence written 110 years before the Berlin fire, by a poet whose own books were thrown into it. The line has become a lasting lesson for later generations that attacks on books and ideas can be a first step towards attacks on human beings.

Why it matters

Heine's line is now one of the world's best-known warnings against censorship, reminding museum visitors and passers-by how the persecution of ideas can lead to the persecution of people.

About Heinrich Heine

Düsseldorf-born Jewish poet of the Lorelei and the Book of Songs, a sharp-tongued satirist and Paris exile whose lyrics became some of the best-loved songs in German.

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Heinrich Heine

1797–1856 · Poetry & prose

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