The Empty Library (1995), also known as Bibliothek or simply Library, is a public memorial by Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman dedicated to the remembrance of the Nazi book burnings that took place in the Bebelplatz in Berlin, Germany on May 10, 1933. The memorial is set into the cobblestones of the plaza and contains a collection of empty subterranean bookcases.
It is located in the centre of Berlin next to the Unter den Linden. The memorial commemorates 10 May 1933, when students of the National Socialist Student Union and many professors of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (today Humboldt-Universität) under the musical accompaniment of SA- and SS-Kapellen, burnt over 20,000 books from many, mainly Jewish, communist, liberal and social-critical authors, before a large audience at the university's Old Library and in the middle of the former Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Platz (1911–1947), now Bebelplatz. [1]
On April 6, 1933, the Nazi German Student Association's Main Office for Press and Propaganda announced a nationwide initiative "against the un-German spirit", climaxing in a literary Säuberung, or cleansing, by fire. [2] Local chapters of the group were charged with the distribution of literary blacklists that included Jewish, Marxist, Socialist, anti-family, and anti-German literature and planned grand ceremonies for the public to gather and dispose of the objectionable material. [3] In Berlin, the German Student Union organized the celebratory book burnings that took place on May 10, 1933 on a dreary, rainy evening. [2] 40,000 people crowded into the Bebelplatz as 5,000 German students processed in holding burning torches to ignite the pile of books seized for the event. [4] Joseph Goebbels, the German Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, spoke at the event, declaring that "the era of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is now at an end… and the future German man will not just be a man of books… this late hour [I] entrust to the flames the intellectual garbage of the past." [3] [5] Thirty-four additional book burnings took place across Germany that month. [3]
On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Bebelplatz book burning in 1993, The Berlin Senat for Building and Housing invited thirty artists to participate in a memorial design competition. [6] Israeli installation artist Micha Ullman's subtle submission was selected as the winner. [7] Ullman, whose work frequently deals with themes of absence and memory, proposed digging a memorial into the surface of the Bebelplatz, thus creating a void. [8] The monument was unveiled on May 20, 1995. [9]
The Empty Library consists of a 530 by 706 by 706 centimetres (209 in × 278 in × 278 in) subterranean room lined with empty white bookshelves, beneath a glass plate in the pavement of the square. [10] The memorial exemplifies what art historian James E. Young terms as "negative form," sinking into the cobblestones of the Bebelplatz to create a void. [8] The placement of the room underneath the cobblestones of the plaza forces viewers to crane their necks in order to look into the memorial. Approximating the volume of the 20,000 books burned on that site on May 10, 1933, [10] the space inside the monument is air-conditioned to prevent condensation on the glass pane that sits level with the surface of the plaza and remains continuously lit. [6] While The Empty Library's low profile can make it difficult to spot during the daytime, at night it illuminates the Bebelplatz with an eerie white light. [7]
The memorial is located at the height of the backfilled western ramp of the Lindentunnel, which was demolished for the construction over a length of 25 metres. [1]
Ullman's memorial is situated within the Bebelplatz in the Mitte district of Berlin, Germany. Located in front the Former Royal Library and across the Unter den Linden from Humboldt University, the monument sits at the same location as the pyre of books burned on May 10, 1933. [6]
Several years after the main structure of the memorial was built, a bronze plaque was inlaid into the cobblestones a few feet away. [7] Etched with a quote from German-Jewish author Heinrich Heine's play Almansor (1820), it features the chilling message:
That was but a prelude;
where they burn books,
they will ultimately burn people as well. [9]
Though Heine's words are remarkably prescient within the context of the Holocaust, copies of his works, which were featured on the Nazi literary blacklists, were likely destroyed during the Berlin book burning. [3]
The costs for the care and maintenance of the memorial (for example, the special glass pane must be replaced every three months) are covered by Wall AG. [11] [12]
Years after the construction of the memorial, a parking garage was built underneath the Bebelplatz. Ullman was a vocal opponent of the construction, citing worries regarding the philosophical resonance of the monument as a void changing. [13] The garage contains an access route that enables maintenance workers to clean the monument two times a year. [13]
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps, also called death camps, or killing centers, in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million people – mostly Jews – in the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily murdered by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Extermination through labour was also used at the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps. Millions were also murdered in concentration camps, in the Aktion T4, or directly on site.
Kristallnacht (German pronunciation:[kʁɪsˈtalnaχt] ) or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (German: Novemberpogrome, pronounced[noˈvɛm.bɐ.poˌɡʁoːmə] ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung (SA) paramilitary and Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnacht (literally 'Crystal Night') comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.
The Humboldt University of Berlin is a public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany.
The Jewish Museum Berlin was opened in 2001 and is the largest Jewish museum in Europe. On 3,500 square metres of floor space, the museum presents the history of Jews in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present day, with new focuses and new scenography. It consists of three buildings, two of which are new additions specifically built for the museum by architect Daniel Libeskind. German-Jewish history is documented in the collections, the library and the archive, and is reflected in the museum's program of events.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial, is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold. It consists of a 19,000-square-metre (200,000 sq ft) site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. The original plan was to place nearly 4,000 slabs, but after the recalculation, the number of slabs that could legally fit into the designated areas was 2,711. The stelae are 2.38 m long, 0.95 m wide and vary in height from 0.2 to 4.7 metres. They are organized in rows, 54 of them going north–south, and 87 heading east–west at right angles but set slightly askew. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.
Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a German compound noun describing processes that since the later 20th century have become key in the study of post-1945 German literature, society, and culture.
The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was an early private sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The name is variously translated as Institute of Sex Research, Institute of Sexology, Institute for Sexology or Institute for the Science of Sexuality. The Institute was a non-profit foundation situated in Tiergarten, Berlin. It was the first sexology research center in the world.
The Paper Clips Project, by middle school students from the small southeastern Tennessee town of Whitwell, created a monument for the Holocaust victims of Nazi Germany. It started in 1998 as a simple 8th-grade project to study other cultures, and then evolved into one gaining worldwide attention. At last count, over 30 million paper clips had been received.
The Bebelplatz is a public square in the central Mitte district of Berlin, the capital of Germany.
Fabrikaktion is the term for the last major roundup of Jews for deportation from Berlin, which began on 27 February 1943, and ended about a week later. Most of the remaining Jews were working at Berlin plants or for the Jewish welfare organization. The term Fabrikaktion was coined by survivors after World War II; the Gestapo had designated the plan Große Fabrik-Aktion. While the plan was not restricted to Berlin, it later became most notable for catalyzing the Rosenstrasse protest, the only mass public demonstration of German citizens which contested the Nazi government's deportation of the Jews.
The Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial also known as the Nameless Library stands in Judenplatz in the first district of Vienna. It is the central memorial for the Austrian victims of the Holocaust and was designed by British artist Rachel Whiteread.
The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. These included books written by Jewish, half-Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist, and sexologist authors among others. The initial books burned were those of Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky, but came to include very many authors, including Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, writers in French and English, and effectively any book incompatible with Nazi ideology. In a campaign of cultural genocide, books were also burned en masse by the Nazis in occupied territories, such as in Poland.
Micha Ullman is an Israeli sculptor and professor of art.
The memorial to gay and lesbian victims of National Socialism is a monument in Cologne, Germany, dedicated to the gay and lesbian victims of the Nazis.
Cora Berliner was an economist and social scientist and a victim of the Nazi regime. She was a pioneer of social work.
Wolfgang Herrmann was a German librarian and member of the Nazi Party, whose blacklist provided the template for the Nazi book burnings in May 1933.
Spandau Synagogue was a synagogue at 12 Lindenufer in the Old Town area of Spandau, Berlin, Germany. It was also known as Spandauer Vereinssynagoge. The synagogue was built in 1894–95 and was destroyed on 9 November 1938 (Kristallnacht) when it was set on fire. The ruins were removed, probably in 1942. The site is now marked by a memorial tablet, installed in 1988. The congregation maintained a Jewish cemetery, on Spandau's Neue Bergstrasse, which was closed by the Nazi government and was evacuated in 1939 to the Cemetery of the Orthodox congregation Adass Jisroel in Berlin.
The Platz des Unsichtbaren Mahnmals – or in English, the Place of the Invisible Memorial – is a memorial to Jewish cemeteries. It is located in Saarbrücken, capital of the German state of the Saarland. To the visitor, the memorial is completely invisible – it only appears as a sign at the place, reading "Platz des Unsichtbaren Mahnmals".
The Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture was responsible for the agricultural policy of Germany during the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1933 and during the Nazi dictatorship of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945. It was headed by a Reichsminister under whom a state secretary served. On 1 January 1935, the ministry merged with the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture, Domains and Forests, founded in 1879. Until 1938 and the Anschluss with Austria, it was called the "Reich and Prussian Ministry of Food and Agriculture". After the end of National Socialism in 1945 and of the Allied occupation of Germany, the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture was established in 1949 as a successor in the Federal Republic of Germany.