Bebelplatz. La notte dei libri bruciati

10 May 1933. At the stroke of midnight in Bebelplatz, in the centre of Berlin, thousands of books are set on fire. Joseph Goebbels proclaims: ‘The German man of the future will no longer be a man of books, but a man of character.’ The smell of petrol and ash spreads across Europe. 24 February 2022. Russia invades the Ukraine, and a few months later a new conflict devastates the Gaza Strip. During a tour of Italian cultural institutes from Hamburg to Munich, Fabio Stassi crosses the squares of the Bücherverbrennungen, the book burnings, and rapidly retraces the memory of fire and censorship, of the first aerial bombardments on civilians, of the looting of bookshops and libraries. He studies maps and reports, wonders about the role of culture and the blindness of war, investigates the instinct of human beings to dominate. In the end he composes a small atlas of ‘harmful and unwanted’ literature and traces five Italian writers destined for the flames by the Nazis: Pietro Aretino, the bard of Renaissance freedom; Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, citizen of the world and incurable utopian; Emilio Salgari, anti-imperialist beloved in South America; Ignazio Silone, radical anti-fascist, and Maria Volpi, the only woman on the list, uninhibited narrator of female pleasure and independence. Stassi’s passionate discourse is in defence of everything that transgresses the norm, a journey full of correspondences, twists and new interpretations, from Ovid to Cervantes, from Arendt to Canetti, Sebald, Morante, Bernhard: an invitation to unearth the library of Don Quixote. Because rebellion is learnt by reading, and every reader, for whatever reason, ‘is always a threat’. As Alberto Manguel writes in the Introduction: ‘Somewhere in the world a mind is devising words to be traced with the hand and deciphered with the eyes amidst smoke and ashes’.