May 10, 1933. At Bebelplatz in central Berlin, at the stroke of midnight thousands of books are set on fire. Joseph Goebbels proclaims, “The German man of the future will no longer be a man made of books, but a man of character.” A smell of gasoline and ash spreads over all of Europe.
Feb. 24, 2022. Russia invades Ukraine, and within a few months a new conflict will devastate the Gaza Strip. On a tour of Italian cultural institutes from Hamburg to Munich, Fabio Stassi traverses the squares of the Bücherverbrennungen, the book burnings, and climbs at a relentless pace up the memory of fire and censorship, of the first aerial bombings of civilians, of the looting of bookstores and libraries. He studies maps and reports, questions the role of culture and the blindness of war, investigates the overpowering instinct of human beings. Eventually he composes a small atlas of “harmful and undesirable” literature and tracks down five Italian writers destined for the flames by the Nazis: Pietro Aretino, the cantor of Renaissance freedom; Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, a citizen of the world and incurable utopian; Emilio Salgari, an anti-imperialist beloved in South America; Ignazio Silone, a radical anti-fascist; and Maria Volpi, the only woman on the list, an uninhibited narrator of female pleasure and independence.
Stassi's is an impassioned speech in defense of all that transgresses the norm, a journey full of correspondences, twists and turns and new interpretations, from Ovid to Cervantes, from Arendt to Canetti, Sebald, Morante, Bernhard: an invitation to dig up Don Quixote's library. Because rebellion is learned by reading, and every reader, to any power, “is always a threat.”
As Alberto Manguel writes in the Introduction, “Somewhere in the world a mind is devising words to be traced with the hand and deciphered with the eyes amid smoke and ashes.”