WHY ENEMIES OF THE TRUTH BURN BOOKS
Burning The Books Richard Ovenden John Murray £20 ★★★★★
Throughout history there has been as great an urge to eradicate knowledge as to preserve it. As Richard Ovenden says in this stirring volume, ‘knowledge holds great power, the pursuit of gathering and preserving it is a valuable task, and its loss can be an early warning sign of a decaying civilisation’.
From 1933 the Nazis systematically ransacked the public libraries of the Reich, burning books written by Jews, communists and homosexuals. ‘You do well,’ exhorted Goebbels, ‘to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed.’
And so has it been for millennia. Ovenden reminds us of the loss of the library in Alexandria, in ancient times, when 500,000 scrolls were used as fuel to heat bath water. Sappho’s lesbian poems were destroyed ‘on moral grounds’, and it is possible that entire unknown works by Homer and Seneca went up in smoke.
The first thing a new regime or invading army does, to make its presence felt, is smash the treasures and relics of the old regime. This happened not only in classical Greece and Rome, but in Bosnia, in 1992, when university libraries in Sarajevo were deliberately shelled.
When a party knows its days in power are numbered, again the state records face destruction. The Soviet Union, East Germany and Romania are obvious examples – but Ovenden tells us that when the British left Africa and the Far East, colonial administrators hid evidence of racist and prejudiced behaviour.
The greatest period of vandalism, nevertheless, was in the 16th Century, during the Reformation, when Henry VIII became head of the Church in England and broke with the Pope in Rome. Monastic libraries were sacked, medieval illuminated manuscripts plundered. The Book Of Kells, now in Dublin, survived ‘the state sponsorship of this destruction’ only by chance, when the abbot, at personal risk to himself, stole it away. ‘Hundreds of thousands of books were destroyed,’ says Ovenden – you can almost hear him weeping.
Ovenden is the chieftain at the Bodleian, Oxford’s library. His point is how fragile all these methods of ‘documenting civilisation’ can be. Not only are there wars and explosions, but paper archives are ‘highly combustible’, or else at risk from mould, floods and insects.
Then there is the cold fact that not everyone is so keen on clinging to the truth. Byron’s publishers burned his memoirs in the grate. Sylvia Plath’s journals were destroyed by Ted Hughes ‘to protect Hughes’s own reputation’. These were unforgivable literary crimes.
Finally, there is the tragic statistic that local authority budgets for public libraries were slashed by £30 million in 2017/2018 alone. Those that haven’t closed completely are now ‘community hubs’ where you can pick up leaflets about cycle trails or mobile chiropodists.