After the initial flurry of reporting, the bonfires dropped out of the news, largely dismissed as some sort of excessive college prank or saturnalia. Compared to the interest in the spectacle provided by the book burnings, an intimately related article in the New York Times less than a fortnight later speaks to the difficulty in reconciling the symbolism of the [Fascists’] fires: ‘Nazis Seize 500 Tons of Marxist Writings’.
Rather than the exhibitions of the bonfires, this enormous quantity of books and pamphlets, confiscated from both public and private libraries, was to be sold for pulp with paper mills bidding for it at the rate of two marks per 100 pounds. It is designed, the paper writes, ‘to make good Captain Goering’s dictum that “in fifty years nobody in Germany will know what Marxism is”’.
Compared to the amount destroyed in the bonfires, the planned destruction of 500 tons is a significant escalation, but this time, just like the rhetoric of absolute destruction surrounding the fate of Hirschfeld’s institute, it again failed to really spark much attention.
A week after the fires in Berlin, on 17 May 1933, Hitler, in full dress uniform, addressed the Reichstag and declared that another European war would be madness, but the German nation could not be expected to allow itself to be further weakened. For the international press, the recherché symbolism of the fires was eclipsed by the corrosive reality (and the infinitely less symbolic) question of German rearmament.
Creepy, but I am sure that plenty of antisocialists would still enthusiastically endorse attempts to erase the very concept of communism from existence.