When news broke in May 1933 that Nazis had staged book burnings across Germany, the American response was swift and angry. Nearly 200,000 people streamed onto the streets of cities across the country in protest. Authors, some of whose books had been burned, condemned the censorship. President Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted the imagery of the smoldering pyres in his speeches, such as when he said, “If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own.”

Today, the better part of a century later, book burnings remain one of the most recognizable images of the Nazi era. This is perhaps because of the influence they had at the time. For many Americans, they encapsulated the German regime. They served as a portent for what was to come. And yet, as Andrew Pettegree tells us in “The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading,” his sprawling new cultural history, less than 20 years earlier, during spells of wartime chauvinism, Americans themselves had zealously burned German books, and librarians were happy to lead the way.

In “The Book at War,” Pettegree, a professor of modern history at Scotland’s University of St Andrews, explores how printed media has shaped people in relation to conflict. Books and war, he argues, are closely intertwined. Books have conditioned readers to expect and subsequently support war. They have been vectors of ideology and plunder for victors. Yet they have also represented great solace and solidarity in times of combat, for civilians taking cover and for soldiers on the front lines.

In cogent and steady prose, Pettegree recounts an array of historical moments, among them the pivotal role Percy Fitzgerald’s “The Transvaal From Within” played in marshaling British support for a fight against the Boers in South Africa, and how newspapers for boys in 19th-century Britain inculcated in their youthful readers a readiness to take arms. Similarly, he writes of Prussian general Friedrich von Bernhardi’s “Germany and the Next War,” published in 1911 to wide acclaim, which argued in favor of war “for the sake of our position as a world power.” Later, books about Nazi Germany and the Blitz prepared Americans for enthusiastic entry to the Second World War. Pettegree demonstrates that, as with all culture, books can be seized to do either good or harm, stiffening resistance and emboldening patriotism as surely as they can expand minds.

Pettegree clearly possesses an exceptional breadth of knowledge, in addition to a skill for nuanced narrative and convincing arguments. His accounts are often fascinating, such as his description of how modern spycraft relied on librarians, books and academics. He tells us of banned books entering Germany in the backpacks of Allied soldiers, and of “pudgy” and “insubordinate” Evelyn Waugh petitioning his commanding officers for leave to write what would become “Brideshead Revisited.” (Waugh was given the leave, in part because he was so insufferable.)

Pettegree’s fondness for detail is at times indulgent. In some sections he plods through digressions, giving, for instance, a far deeper account of the evolution of 19th-century military education than even a keen reader might be prepared for. But these tangents begin to cease as the book builds momentum around the halfway mark and maintains its energy thereafter.

A high-water mark comes when Pettegree reveals, in acute actuarial detail, the literary price of war. Since antiquity, marauding armies have pillaged libraries, sending home volumes of interest or value. World War II saw the destruction of books at an elevated scale. Across Europe, the Germans ransacked Jewish libraries, dispatching rare books to Germany and pulping or burning what remained. Poland lost 90 percent of the contents of its public and school libraries, including 300,000 volumes at the Warsaw Public Library, which were torched by the Germans in the final days of their occupation. Between the Wehrmacht’s advance and retreat, the U.S.S.R. lost more than 100 million books. All in all, some 500 million books perished during the fighting in Europe. Pettegree acknowledges that much of this stock was replenished, but the losses – including certain irreplaceable Jewish collections and the historical heritage of Poland – are searing and deserve a greater presence in our memorializing of the war.

Some of the most evocative parts of “The Book at War” are about people enduring conflict with the help of books. Within a week of Allied soldiers taking the beaches of Normandy, cartons of paperbacks arrived at the bridgehead. Books reminded the troops of life away from danger. They were handled until dirt and wear rendered them unreadable. One soldier noted, “To heave (a book) in the garbage can would be tantamount to striking your grandmother.” Anne Frank, hiding from the Germans with her family in Amsterdam, found a lifeline in books: “Ordinary people don’t know how much books can mean to someone who’s cooped up.”

These accounts encourage us to ponder how soldiers stationed in eastern Ukraine or civilians in Gaza are interacting with books at this very moment. It will be for Pettegree’s intellectual descendants to tell us more.

Makana Eyre is the author of “Sing, Memory,” a book of nonfiction about music in the Nazi camps.

Copy the Story Link

« Previous

From maple syrup to ‘The Maine Christmas Song,’ children’s book publisher encapsulates the state

Next »

Comedian Jo Koy is picked to host the Golden Globes