Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack

Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack

Author: Richard Ovenden

ISBN-13: 978-1529378757

Publisher: John Murray

Guideline Price: £20

Since humanity began writing down information (usually, at the beginning, for taxation or religious purposes) on clay tablets, that information has been in constant danger of attack, for reasons to do with conflict, religion, imperialism, stupidity and tragic accident.

Book burning has been, and continues to be, a highly symbolic ritual, signifying rejection of certain versions of humanity’s experience and the elevation of the one true version favoured by the arsonists. The Nazis excelled at it, as do Islamic State today, but they had plenty of precursors.

Richard Ovenden, director of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, brings us on an erudite, frightening and often exhilarating journey, from the partial destruction of the huge library of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in 612 BC to the current threat to human knowledge posed by our reliance on powerful private interests who control our digital resources.

The erudition is a product of years steeped in libraries and archives, directorship of one of the world’s great libraries, and a well-stocked mind with a natural talent for writing history. The frightening part is the abundant human appetite and capacity for destruction of knowledge over the millennia. The exhilaration comes from contemplating the numerous brave and dedicated people who kept rebuilding what was lost, sometimes at the price of their lives.

Ovenden chooses a number of examples of destruction from a copious field. He demolishes the myths of the destruction of the great Library of Alexandria – accidentally by Romans or purposely by Muslims – and tells us the library died because of lack of funding and proper management, much less interesting than a dramatic cataclysm, but much more likely, and alas all too familiar to librarians and archivists today. There is a wonderful and heart-breaking chapter on the destruction of the great monastic libraries in the 1530s, executed by the now-famous Thomas Cromwell as part of the dissolution of the monasteries to greatly enrich Henry VIII, who ultimately gave him no thanks for it.

Ovenden does not pull his punches on England’s barbarity in the matter of knowledge-destruction, except perhaps a little on all those colonial records brought back to the centre of empire in the 20th century, some of Ireland’s among them.

Nazi persecution

The destruction of the infant Library of Congress in Washington in 1814, again by Britain, is described, as well as its restocking by Thomas Jefferson’s private library (sold, not donated), and its second destruction in 1851, this time by an innocent but deadly chimney fire. The burning of the great library at Leuven in Belgium in 1914 by the German army, and again in 1940, again by the German army, introduces a new villain to the story.

Nazi Germany had a mania for book-burning, beginning in 1933. The regime’s destruction of Jewish lives was accompanied by dedication to the annihilation of Jewish culture. The story of the many brave victims of Nazi persecution and often murder, who ingeniously managed to save vast quantities of books and manuscripts from their oppressors is one of the most moving in this book.

The so-called “Paper Brigade”, ordered from the ghetto in Vilna (now Vilnius) in Lithuania, to separate the Jewish books in Vilna’s libraries into those destined for Nazi examination and those to be pulped in a paper mill, managed to build an entire underground storage facility in the ghetto, which survived the war with its precious materials intact. Nearly every member of the Paper Brigade was murdered before witnessing the results of their daring enterprise. There are many heroes in this book, but these are the ones who risked most.

Ovenden is interested in the issues raised by the disposition of literary estates, and he chooses two to explore: those of Franz Kafka and Philip Larkin. Both expressed a firm desire to have their personal papers destroyed after death: in Kafka’s case by his friend and executor, Max Brod; and in Larkin’s case by his long-term lover, Monica Jones.

Brod always made it clear to Kafka that he could not destroy his manuscripts; despite fairly clear instructions to do so, he did not, instead managing the estate to make Kafka one of the best-known writers in the world. Without him we would not have Joseph K. Jones delegated her sad task, in this case to burn Larkin’s diaries, to his secretary, Betty Mackereth, who did what she was told, sneaking peaks as she went along, and concluding that Larkin was very unhappy. Ovenden consoles us with the information that Larkin’s extensive correspondence with Jones survives, a partial surrogate for the lost diaries.

Literary diaries

The memoirs of Lord Byron, the highly scandalous poet of the early 19th century, were burned in the fireplace of his publisher (John Murray, precursor of the publisher of Ovenden’s book) to save his family (and no doubt many others) embarrassment. Ted Hughes destroyed the last journal of his wife, Sylvia Plath, which contained entries leading up to her suicide. An earlier volume was either lost or also destroyed by Hughes. He managed her estate with editorial skill and a good deal of archival integrity, but questions still swirl around both the reasons for his destruction of her last journal, and the whereabouts of the lost one.

One of the greatest potential literary losses of them all was averted two millennia ago when Virgil’s friend Varius refused to burn the Aeneid.

Ovenden takes us through a more recent example of cultural extermination: the Serbian destruction of the National Library of Bosnia in Sarajevo, part of a Nazi-like intent to rid Bosnia of all of its Muslim culture. Then we have an interesting chapter on the destruction or sequestration of colonial archives. The story of the British destruction of, and secrecy regarding, Kenyan archives makes for sad and infuriating reading.

The author commendably condemns the very recent British destruction of the crucial Windrush records, which led to the extraordinarily cruel treatment of a cohort of British citizens.

The chapter on the relatively sudden privatisation and monetisation of vast quantities of human information, by digital companies with huge resources, is a cautionary tale for all of us concerned with the future of that information, and with our own privacy, in many cases compromised by our own desires for human connection, and less worthy desires to spread disinformation and other kinds of poison through social media. The large tech companies have no mandate for the public good, or for the preservation of the vast amount of information they hold.

This is not just a fascinating, often entertaining, surprising, incredibly well-researched and beautifully written book. It is an important book, now more than ever, when the whole idea of evidence is under attack from many quarters. Here in Ireland, we know the cost of losing a significant archive, having destroyed our National Archives during the Civil War. (I was slightly peeved that Ovenden didn’t devote some attention to this catastrophe; it would have been interesting to have his take on it.) The wonderful Beyond 2022 project is the recuperative force in this case, digitally bringing together copies and surrogates of many of the records lost in 1922.

Burning the Books reminds us how important that recuperative work is, and will, alas, continue to be.
Catriona Crowe is the former head of special projects at the National Archives of Ireland