shirer, burning libraries, shutting up the poets

For about the past year I had a copy of William Shirer's Berlin Diary sitting on the shelf, in the reading queue. I was turned on to this book by my friend Sam Gould, whom I once caught with it on a trip, toted along as his casual reading. Later my brother-in-law told me that this book became a popular assigned book in many college European History courses for the generation born in the decade before World War II. And that explains its frequent availability in secondhand bookstores and rummage sales.

Upon my latest return from Vienna, I was feeling the need to process my experience through some reading and so finally cracked the book. I'm now getting into the three hundreds, where Shirer leaves Berlin to cover the Western Front, which the Germans had only days ago pushed westard into Belgium and the Netherlands. On his way to the front he passes through Aachen and later Louvain. He tells of the Germans having deliberately destroyed the University Library there, and of them burning the irreplaceable books. And then, the High Command lying about it, declaring that the British did the deed, in an attempt to fabricate another excuse for Geman aggression.

And then today received in my inbox from a friend this link, to hip hop poet Kevin Coval's blog. He's composed a poem in response to the Israeli Defence Force's closure of a literature festival that was to be held last month in Jerusalem.

The opening epigraph says it all...

Reflection on The Israeli Army shutting down The Palestine Festival of Literature
in the month of May in 2009: Burning Books, A Bebelplatz in Jerusalem

Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.
Heinrich Heine

From there, he goes into something sad, outraged, and beautiful.
Check out the whole thing here.