Exactly
a century after the burning of Washington another invading army encountered a
library, and saw it as a perfect way to strike a blow at the heart of their
enemy. This time the action would have a global impact, as the means of spreading
news had been transformed in the century since the burning of the Library of
Congress troubled the young George Gleig. The burning of the library of Louvain
University (known then as the Université catholique de Louvain) in 1914 by the
invading German army would be the focus of profound political outrage; unlike
the Washington incident, the fate of the library would figure as an
international cause célèbre. Young Louvain Jesuit Eugène Dupiéreux wrote in his
journal in 1914:
“Until
today I had refused to believe what the newspapers said about the atrocities
committed by the Germans; but in Leuven I have seen what their Kultur is like.
More savage than the Arabs of Caliph Omar, who burnt down the Alexandrian
library, we see them set fire, in the twentieth century, to the famous
University Library.”
Louvain
University was the earliest university to be established in the country that is
today known as Belgium. Founded in 1425, the university had educated a number
of great minds, including the theologian Saint Robert Bellarmine, the
philosopher Justus Lipsius and the cartographer Gerard Mercator. The university
was comprised of separate colleges (by the end of the 16th century there were
46 of them), each of which had built up book collections during the Middle
Ages, with the result that no central library existed until the foundation of
the central university library in 1636.
This
library grew over the succeeding century and a half, its collections increasing
in size through purchase and donation. Louvain was a comparatively rich
university and its riches helped the development of the library. In the late
17th century a new approach to shelving, recently established in France, was
adopted with bookcases fitted against the walls of the library, with windows
above, as opposed to the old medieval and Renaissance fashion of bookcases
projecting out from the walls into the library room.
Between
1723 and 1733 a new library building was constructed, and as the 18th century
progressed the wealth of the university meant that it could acquire collections
beyond those needed for the immediate use of the scholars. This development was
given a strong boost by the allocation to the library of the national privilege
of legal deposit in 1759 by Charles Alexander of Lorraine, the governor general
of the Low Countries (who also allocated the privilege to the Bibliothèque
Royale in Brussels). A few years later the library was the beneficiary of the
forced closure of a neighboring library—the suppression of the Jesuit order in
1773 allowed the library to purchase books from the library of the Jesuit house
in the city (the books from the Louvain Jesuits are now dispersed across the
world and continue to appear in the antiquarian book trade).
The
university suffered during the late 18th and early 19th centuries as the French
Revolutionary Wars spread into Europe. Louvain’s faculties were forcibly
relocated to Brussels in 1788-90, and the university was formally suppressed in
1797, and then refounded in 1816. Almost ten percent of the books in the
library—more than 800 volumes of incunabula (books printed before 1501),
illustrated editions, and Greek and Hebrew books—were forcibly removed to Paris
in 1794-5 by officials of the Bibliothèque Mazarine (a fate that befell other libraries
in the region, including the Bibliothèque Royale). Other books were
cherry-picked by the librarian of the École Centrale in Brussels.
The
university and its library were temporarily closed again by the revolution of
1830, which created the Belgian nation. The university reopened in 1835 as the
Catholic University and the library became a symbol of national renewal, an
engine for intellectual and social power and a crucial element in cementing the
university’s new role in the Belgian national consciousness. It was also made a
public library, one of three (with Liège and Ghent) in Belgium, but regarded as
the greatest.
By 1914
the library at Louvain had over 300,000 volumes in its collection, and a group
of special collections of international quality. The importance of the library
could be seen in its glorious baroque buildings. Its holdings reflected Belgian
cultural identity, documenting the intellectual contribution of the greatest
minds of the region, and preserving the university’s strongly Catholic cultural
flavor. It was also a national resource, as a library of legal deposit and open
to the general public. There were almost a thousand volumes of manuscripts,
mostly classical authors and theological texts, including the Church Fathers,
and medieval philosophy and theology. It also held a sizeable collection of
incunabula and uncatalogued collections of oriental books, and manuscripts in
Hebrew, Chaldaic and Armenian.
The
Hague Convention would eventually incorporate much stronger sanctions for acts
of violence against cultural property, but its power in the First World War was
still relatively weak. The burning of Louvain University Library, and the
response to it from the international community, would help change this, not
least by the inclusion of a separate clause in the Treaty of Versailles dealing
with the reconstruction of the library.
On August 31 the Daily Mail reported “A crime against the world,” stating that Germany could not be forgiven “so long as the world retains a shred of sentiment.” The leading British intellectual Arnold Toynbee felt that the Germans had deliberately targeted the intellectual heart of the university, without which it could not carry on its work. The French Catholic newspaper La Croix felt that the Barbarians had burned Louvain. The German view, echoing the excuses given by the British army in Washington in 1814, was that there was civilian resistance in the city, with sniper fire on German troops, which triggered the atrocities.
In the immediate aftermath, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany sent a telegram to the American President—no doubt fearful that the incident might encourage the Americans to join the Allies—arguing that the German army had merely responded to attacks from the civilian population of the city. On October 4, 1914, following accusations of war crimes, a group of 93 prominent German artists, writers, scientists and intellectuals published a manifesto concerning the events in Louvain. It was entitled “An appeal to the world of culture” and was signed by some of Germany’s most prominent cultural leaders including Fritz Haber, Max Liebermann and Max Planck. They wrote: “It is not true that our troops treated Louvain brutally. Furious inhabitants having treacherously fallen upon them in their quarters, our troops were obliged, their hearts aching, to fire a part of the town as a punishment.” The controversy over the cause of the library’s destruction has continued for over a century. In 2017, the German art historian Ulrich Keller laid the blame for the devastation once again at the feet of the Belgian resistance.
Romain Rolland, the French writer and intellectual who was a great admirer of German culture, wrote in puzzled indignation to the Frankfurter Zeitung in September 1914, addressing his words to his fellow writer Gerhard Hauptmann, calling on him and other German intellectuals to reconsider their position: “how do you wish to be referred to from now on if you reject the title ‘Barbarian’? Are you Goethe’s or Attila’s descendant?” Hauptmann’s response was unequivocal: better to live as Attila’s descendants than have “Goethe’s descendants” written on their tomb.
Not all Germans felt this way. Adolf von Harnack, director of the Royal Prussian Library in Berlin (now the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), a great biblical scholar in his own right, and one of the signatories of the “manifesto of the 93,” wrote to the Prussian minister of culture to suggest appointing a German official in occupied Belgium to ensure that libraries would not be damaged in the rest of the war. The proposal was accepted and in late March 1915 Fritz Milkau, director of the University Library in Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), was sent to Brussels to take on this role. Milkau brought with him such people as a young reservist soldier who was librarian of the University of Bonn, called Richard Oehler, and they visited 110 libraries in Belgium discussing conservation and protection.
The fourth anniversary of the destruction of Louvain University Library was marked by a commemoration held in the French port of Le Havre, the seat of the exiled Belgian government. The government officials were joined by representatives of the Allies who made up a diverse group including an envoy of the King of Spain and a delegate from Yale University. Public messages of support were sent from across the world as the mood of sympathy for Belgium shifted emphasis from outrage to support for rebuilding.
In the UK the John Rylands Library in Manchester was one of the most visible and generous of the libraries that felt deep empathy with the losses of Louvain. In December 1914 the governors of the library decided to donate some of their duplicates to Louvain in order to “give some practical expression to the deep feelings of sympathy with the authorities of the University of Louvain in the irreparable loss which they have suffered through the barbarous destruction of the University buildings and the famous library.” They earmarked 200 books, which they felt would be the “nucleus of the new library.” The John Rylands offered not only their own books but also to collect books donated for Louvain from private and public collections in the UK.
Henry Guppy, director of the John Rylands, was the driving force behind British support for Louvain. He issued a pamphlet in 1915 reporting an “encouraging” response to the public appeal for donations of books coming from as far afield as the Auckland Public Library in New Zealand. In fact, Guppy’s efforts were remarkable. In July 1925 the final shipment of books to Louvain was made, bringing the total to 55,782, which took twelve shipments to transfer and represented around 15 per cent of the books that were lost in the destruction of August 1914. The authorities in Manchester were enormously proud of their efforts, demonstrating that the plight of Louvain University Library touched ordinary members of the public far removed from Belgium.
As the war ended the international effort to rebuild the library moved up several gears. This process was aided by the special inclusion of the library in Article 247 of the Treaty of Versailles (June 28, 1919): “Germany undertakes to furnish the University of Louvain . . . manuscripts, incunabula, printed books, maps, and objects of collection corresponding in number and value to those destroyed in the burning by Germany of the Library of Louvain.”
America too saw an opportunity to support the international effort to help Louvain rebuild its library, not just to show cultural and intellectual solidarity but as an opportunity to convey “soft power.” Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, was very active in leading the American initiatives, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor sent books.
In October 1919 Cardinal Mercier, the Archbishop of Mechelen and Primate of Belgium who had led the Belgian people in resistance to German occupation, visited Ann Arbor to receive an honorary doctorate of laws. His bravery during the war was cited in the presentation, which was made in a hall packed with over five thousand members of the university, and in response the Belgian cardinal was at pains to thank the “boys” of America who had fought for the freedom of his country. After the Belgian National Anthem and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” were sung a book was presented to Cardinal Mercier. The book was full of symbolism. It was an edition of the Boethius text De consolatione philosophiae (The consolation of philosophy), which had been printed in Louvain in 1484 by a German printer, Johannes de Westfalia, who had come from Paderborn and Cologne to establish the first printing house in the Low Countries.
The
irony of this particular vignette from history was not lost on the academic
community at Ann Arbor. A Latin inscription was inserted into the book, which
read: “I was printed in the University of Louvain by a certain German who there
received most kindly hospitality. After many years I travelled across the
Atlantic Ocean, to another land, where I happily escaped the destiny which was
so mercilessly visited on my companions by the Germans.” This particular
edition was one of the 300 incunabula, which was part of the Louvain collection
before the destruction of the library, and was therefore chosen to replace a
particularly precious lost item.
The
architecture of the new library, which the Americans took it on themselves to
raise the funds for, was to look to the past and not the future. The style of
the new building chimed closely with the traditional vernacular of the Low
Countries, particularly of the Flemish “renaissance” of the 17th century. But
the library was to be big: enough space for 2 million books and influenced by
the latest thinking in design for research libraries, especially those in
American Ivy League universities such as Columbia, Harvard and Yale. The
cultural politics at play over the renewal of the library were to be expressed
in the decoration of the structure. Over the main entrance was to be a statue
of the Virgin Mary, acknowledging the Catholicism of the city, while two coats
of arms would bear the heraldry of Belgium and the United States.
The
laying of the foundation stone in 1921 was similarly symbolic of this new Belgo-American
relationship. Although the ceremony was attended by representatives of 21
countries and presided over by the King and Queen of Belgium, various cardinals
and Marshal Pétain, the American involvement would take center stage.
The
president of Columbia University and the American Ambassador to Brussels read a
message of goodwill from President Harding. Henry Guppy’s view was that “This
was America’s Day.” Eight years later, on July 4, 1928—the American Day of
Independence—the official ceremony of inauguration of the newly rebuilt Louvain
University Library was held. The American flag was prominent on stage and
speeches were made by the American Ambassador, the chairman of the American
committee to restore the library, representatives of the French committee and
Cardinal Mercier. As if the American presence wasn’t already overshadowing the
Belgian, a statue of President Herbert Hoover was unveiled during the ceremony,
to honor his support of the project. The rebuilding of the library would become
a major source of diplomatic tension between America and Belgium, and helped to
generate the isolationism in foreign policy that would dominate American
politics in the 1930s.
Despite
these grand celebrations the completion of the renovation had become a pressure
point for America throughout the 1920s, as the project became symbolic of
American prestige in Europe. By 1924 the problems of funding were becoming
visible in the media, the New York Times describing the rebuilding of the
library as “A promise unfulfilled” in an editorial in November that year. The
following month Nicholas Murray Butler dissolved his Louvain committee and
passed the task on to Herbert Hoover, then US Secretary of State for Commerce.
With other commentators in the United States bemoaning the failure to complete
the library as a national disgrace, John D. Rockefeller Jr reluctantly pledged
$100,000 towards it, seeing it as a patriotic duty rather than sharing any
enthusiasm for the project. By December 1925 the funds had finally been found
and the reconstruction of the half-finished library could recommence.
A
further issue then rose to the surface. The epigraphy planned for the building
by its American architect, Whitney Warren—”Furore Teutonico Diruta, Dono
Americano Restituta” (the Latin is straightforward to understand: “Destroyed by
German fury, rebuilt by American donations”)—had been conceived before the
shift in political fault lines in Europe at the end of the 1920s. The sentiment
of this inscription no longer seemed appropriate. Nicholas Murray Butler in
particular began to have reservations about the wisdom of the inscription; he
took up a new role that year as president of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, a philanthropic organization much concerned with the role
of libraries in post-war reconciliation in Europe.
A battle
in the pages of American newspapers now ensued between Warren and Butler, and
this soon spread to Europe. It became a diplomatic and public relations issue,
which exacerbated strong anti-American feelings in Europe following the 1927
execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists who were seen to be
victims of unfair anti-European immigrant views prevalent in America. The
battle over the inscription continued to the days immediately preceding the
ceremony (on July 4 1928) to mark the completion of the building. Warren,
supported by Belgian nationalists, refused to change the inscription. The
university authorities, backed by US government officials, refused to allow it
to go up, and instead placed a blank space on the walls of the library.
Lawsuits were filed by Warren in the following two years and the issue remained
in the news on both sides of the Atlantic, with the blank facade defaced by
Belgian nationalists on two occasions. In the end in 1936 the original
inscription was placed on a war memorial in Dinant, and the issue over the
library finally stopped being news, and both the Americans and the university
authorities in Louvain breathed a sigh of relief.
One
of Europe’s Great Libraries Didn’t Stand a Chance… In Either of the World Wars. Richard Ovenden on the Unlucky History of the
Library of Louvain. LitHub , December 2, 2020
The
opening episode of Carl Sagan’s TV series Cosmos, first shown in 1980, lamented
the most famous burning of books in history—the conflagration that destroyed
the Library of Alexandria. “If I could travel back into time,” Sagan told his
viewers, it would be to the Library of Alexandria, because “all the knowledge
in the ancient world was within those marble walls.” The destruction of the
library was, he said, a warning to us 1,600 years later: “we must never let it
happen again.”
Sagan stood in a line of writers who, for the last two or three hundred years, have made the word Alexandria conjure up not a place—a city in Egypt—but an image of a burning library. The term Alexandria has become shorthand for the triumph of ignorance over the very essence of civilization. From the French Revolution, through the early history of the United States of America, from the First World War to the conflicts in the Balkans in the late 20th century, the word Alexandria has been a reference point for the subsequent destruction of libraries and archives. The greatest library ever assembled by the great civilizations of the ancient world—containing a vast ocean of knowledge now lost to us forever—was incinerated on a great pyre of papyrus.
The story of Alexandria is a myth—in fact a collection of myths and legends, sometimes competing with each other—to which the popular imagination continues to cling. The idea of a truly universal library, a single place where the entire knowledge of the world was stored, has inspired writers as well as librarians throughout history. Our knowledge of the real ancient Library of Alexandria is to say the least patchy, the primary sources being few, and mostly repeating other sources, now lost, or too distant to be able to be sure of. If we are going to heed Sagan’s warning, however, we must be sure of the true reason for the library’s demise.
There were in fact two libraries in ancient Alexandria, The Mouseion and the Serapeum, or the Inner and Outer Libraries. One of our sources about the Alexandrian Library is the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who, in his History (written around AD 380-390) also brings together the two key facts: that there was a massive library, and that it was destroyed.
But while the fact that the library failed to exist beyond the classical period is unquestioned, exactly why is less clear.
Ammianus Marcellinus thought that it happened when the city was sacked under Caesar, and Caesar himself reported the burning of Alexandria as an accidental consequence of his war against his great rival Pompey, in 48–47 BCE. Ships bringing enemy troops had been docked in the harbor, close to a series of warehouses, and Caesar’s troops torched them. In the conflagration that followed, a number of nearby buildings were destroyed. Following the city’s instructions that all incoming ships should be searched for books, which were required to be copied for the library, it is feasible that these seized books had been temporarily stored in the dockside warehouses. In this account, material damage was done to the collections of the library, but it was not its end. This ties in with the account of the geographer Strabo who did much of his own research some decades after the events of 48–47 BCE using sources from the library.
The Serapeum seems to have suffered a fire at some point around CE 181 and again in 217 but was rebuilt, although there is no indication whether the fire affected the library or just the temple complex. In CE 273 the Emperor Aurelian recaptured Alexandria after it had been occupied by the insurgent rebellion of Palmyra, destroying the palace complex and almost certainly inflicting damage on the library, but if this is a true record, then it is possible that the Library of the Serapeum may have outlived the Mouseion.
The writer Edward Gibbon, in his classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire dismissed another theory, that the destruction could be blamed on one of the Muslim conquerors of Egypt, Caliph Omar. This version of events had been reported by some early Christian writers, including an evocative story of the scrolls being fuel for the thousands of hot baths in the city. The Enlightenment skeptic was scathing in his analysis of that account: it was scarcely logical that the Caliph would burn Jewish and Christian religious books, which were also considered holy texts in Islam.
For Gibbon, the Library of Alexandria was one of the great achievements of the classical world and its destruction—which he concludes was due to a long and gradual process of neglect and growing ignorance—was a symbol of the barbarity that overwhelmed the Roman Empire, allowing civilization to leach away the ancient knowledge that was being re-encountered and appreciated in his own day. The fires were major incidents in which many books were lost, but the institution of the library disappeared more gradually both through organizational neglect and through the gradual obsolescence of the papyrus scrolls themselves.
Alexandria is, in that telling, a cautionary tale of the danger of creeping decline, through the underfunding, low prioritization and general disregard for the institutions that preserve and share knowledge: libraries and archives. Today, we must remember that war is not the only way an Alexandria can be destroyed.
The long history of attacks on knowledge includes not just deliberate violence—during the Holocaust or China’s Cultural Revolution, for example—but also the wilful deprioritization of support for these institutions, which we are witnessing in Western societies today. The impact that these various acts of destruction of libraries and archives has had on communities and on society as a whole is profound. Communities in places like Iraq and Mali have seen Islamic extremists target libraries for attack, and in the U.K. over the past decade, more than 800 public libraries have closed through lack of support from local Government. Today, with major technology companies taking control of the archive as it moves into the digital realm, the complacency of society has meant lack of regulation, control and privacy surrounding the most powerful bodies of knowledge ever seen.
“There is no political power without power over the archive,” wrote Jacques Derrida, the great French critic, in his classic work Archive Fever. The power of the “legend” of Alexandria prompted the creation of a new Library of Alexandria in the modern Egyptian city, which was opened in 2002 with a focus on storing and preserving digital information. That Library is still operating today, together with one of the best Schools of Library and Information science in the region. The hum of its vast server farm has replaced the quiet concentration of the scholars who worked in the institution of the classical period. But even the newest, most advanced libraries need to be treasured and respected if the knowledge they contain is to survive.
The Story of the Library of Alexandria Is Mostly a Legend, But the Lesson of Its Burning Is Still Crucial Today. By Richard Ovenden. Time , November 17, 2020.
Bodley’s
Librarian Richard Ovenden discusses the long history of the destruction of
libraries and archives, ranging from the ancient world to the era of
cyberwarfare. His talk will highlight both the social importance of preserving
knowledge, as well as the role of librarians and archivists who have risked and
even lost their own lives to protect the knowledge in their care. Online Event
supported by Friends of the Bodleian. Bodleian Libraries, September 29, 2020.
It must
be the case that Richard Ovenden’s new work was completed before the world
found itself in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, so some chapters in
Burning the Books seem eerily prescient. “The idea that information must be
diffused and made available to the public if government was to be open to
correction also began to be understood,” he writes of 17th-century England,
when prominent intellectuals promoted the collection of social statistics to
stabilise governmental structures and ensure the prosperity and contentment of
the population. He goes on to address the Bills of Mortality for London,
documents listing the number of deaths and analysing the causes of them. As the
diaries of Samuel Pepys confirm, citizens used that information to manage and
modify their own behaviour – most notably in 1665 and 1666, when London was in
the grip of the bubonic plague. “This end of the town every day grows very bad
of the plague,” Pepys wrote on 29 June, 1665. “The Mortality bill is come to
267, which is about 90 more than the last: and of these, but four in the City –
which is a great blessing to us.”
So
Pepys, at home in the City precincts of Seething Lane, felt the blessing of
relative safety; as perhaps did citizens far from the East Midlands as they saw
Leicester go into local lockdown in late June after a spike in coronavirus
cases there. Our safety depends not only on our exposure to the virus but on
how much we trust the information supplied to us, and how we are able to access
that information. In these first decades of the 21st century, we seem beset by
a generalised corruption of information, in part because we are so overwhelmed
by the stuff. In a typical minute last year, Ovenden writes, around the world
18.1 million text messages were sent, 87,500 people were tweeting, and 390,000
apps were downloaded. How to tell information from “fake news” is an urgent
problem brought even more sharply into focus by a pandemic that has already
cost more than 900,000 lives across the globe. But as Ovenden shows in this
wide-ranging and informative book, questions concerning the preservation and
dissemination of information, the wars over who controls it, saves it, destroys
it, are nothing new.
Ovenden
has been Librarian at the Bodleian in Oxford since 2014: he is the 25th holder
of that title. The library was founded by Sir Thomas Bodley (his “raffish
charm”, writes Ovenden, is apparent in the 16th-century portrait that hangs in
the new Weston Library) following the destruction wrought by the Reformation;
Bodley’s contemporary Francis Bacon described the library as “an ark to save
learning from the deluge”.
The
Reformation was “one of the worst periods in the history of knowledge”, Ovenden
writes; hundreds of thousands of books were destroyed as the monasteries and
religious orders that held them were dissolved. Bodley intended his library to
be accessible not just to members of the university but to “the whole republic
of the learned”. He tried to future-proof his creation by entering into an
agreement with the Stationers’ Company of London, meaning every book published
by its members would be deposited in the new library.
The
destruction not only of literary treasures but of vital records did not stop in
the 16th century, of course, and nor did it begin then. Ovenden opens with the
wrecking of the great Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh in
the 7th century BCE, and his tale stretches right into the present. The book
had its beginnings in a piece Ovenden wrote for the Financial Times about the
Windrush scandal – the revelation that landing cards documenting the arrival
into the UK of immigrants from Caribbean countries in the years after the Second
World War had been destroyed by the Home Office, leading to the wrongful
deportation of at least 83 British citizens. The destruction of the documents,
Ovenden wrote, “indicates at best a failure of sound management inside the Home
Office, and at worst a culture of callous disregard towards certain categories
of Britons”. The preservation of knowledge, as Ovenden reminds us in Burning
the Books, is vital to an open, healthy society, “as indeed it has been since
the beginning of our civilisation”.
Perhaps
the reader’s chronological distance might prevent them from being too cut up
about the fate of Ashurbanipal’s clay tablets, but as the book moves along it
is impossible not to be startled and horrified by what one might too easily
call wanton destruction: Ovenden’s whole point, however, is that most of the
time the destruction is not wanton but purposeful, a vigorous effort to erase
culture. The “Paper Brigade” was a group of Jewish intellectuals in Vilnius in
Lithuania who were forced by the Nazis to dismantle the Strashun Library,
perhaps the first Jewish public library in the world. Led by the scholar Herman
Kruk – once director of the Grosser Library in Warsaw – the group sabotaged the
Nazi effort as best they could, and managed to smuggle thousands of books, and
tens of thousands of printed documents, into the Vilna ghetto where they could
be hidden. But that was, and is, a drop in the ocean: as Ovenden notes, it is
estimated that in the dozen years of Nazi dominance, from 1933 to 1945, more
than 100 million books were destroyed.
Perhaps
even more than libraries, national archives stitch the fabric of a society
together. Ovenden contrasts what happened to the archives of East Germany’s
state security organisation, the Stasi, with those of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath
Party after his overthrow in 2003. After the Berlin Wall came down, the Stasi’s
archives remained in Berlin and have now been accessed by more than seven
million people; the Ba’ath Party archives were taken from Iraq and are now at
the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This was meant to be a
short-term arrangement, but as yet the documents have not been returned to
Iraq. “Has the continued absence of the Iraqi archives prolonged the healing of
that society?” Ovenden asks. He provides no easy answers; the strength of this
book is in the questions it raises. He devotes a whole chapter to the
challenges digital memory and archiving present, and whether we are in danger
of handing over responsibility for cultural memory to companies such as
Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google.
Ovenden
grew up in Kent: his passion for libraries was conceived in Deal’s public
library. He reminds us that it was only in 1964 that the Public Libraries and
Museums Act made it a duty for local authorities to provide libraries; in the
age of austerity, the system is in trouble. In 2018-19, there were 3,583 public
libraries in the UK compared with 4,356 in 2009-10: 773 have closed. “There is
nothing more to the credit of a library than that every man finds in it what he
seeks,” wrote the 17th-century French librarian and scholar Gabriel Naudé.
Richard Ovenden is a passionate advocate of that view: despite the tales of
wrecking and pillage that fill his book, it’s clear that he is by nature an
optimist, calling out to the better angels of our nature to fight for the
preservation of what makes us who we are.
The history of book burning. By Erica Wagner. New Statesman, September 16, 2020.
The history of book burning. By Erica Wagner. New Statesman, September 16, 2020.
It’s
both amusing and a little bit touching that a lifelong librarian has written a
book in which librarians are the heroes. None wears a cape; they do not cast
aside their owlish spectacles and transform themselves into muscled hulks.
Rather, it is their very earnestness, diligence and scholarship – along with
their willingness to risk their lives to protect and preserve the truth – that
has the reader cheering them on.
Gemma
and Lawrence chat to Richard Ovenden OBE, author of Burning the Books: A History
of Knowledge Under Attack. Radical Science, the Science Disrupt podcast. October 1, 2020.
A third of the way into his rich and meticulous 3,000 year history of knowledge and all the ways it may be preserved (or not), Richard Ovenden casually mentions that he and his wife once had to clear the house of a family member – a job that involved deciding which letters and diaries should be saved, and which, ultimately, destroyed. As he notes, such decisions are taken everywhere, every day, with few consequences. But occasionally, the fate of such documents can have profound consequences for culture, particularly if the deceased person had a public life. Think of Byron’s publisher, John Murray, tearing up and then burning the manuscript of his memoirs at his house in Albemarle Street; of Philip Larkin’s secretary, Betty Mackereth, feeding his diaries, sheet by sheet, into a Hull University shredder.
At this point, I had to stop reading Ovenden’s book for a moment, to picture the author going through the dressing-table drawers of, say, his elderly aunt. I imagine this would be an oddly impressive sight, for by day he is Bodley’s librarian (the most senior position at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford). If there’s anyone you might want to read your love letters after your death, it’s probably him; as Burning the Books reveals on every page, not only is he careful, diligent and wise, he also knows what to leave out, and what to keep in – and it’s this quality, above all, that makes his book so remarkable. Its sweep is quite astonishing and yet, amazingly, his narrative runs to just 320 pages.
Francis Bacon described the creation by Sir Thomas Bodley of the Bodleian in the 1590s as “an ark to save learning from the deluge” – the deluge in question being the Reformation. Ovenden’s somewhat more diminutive ark, also written at a time of huge political and economic strife, attempts to save the concept of the library itself, something it achieves not through polemic – though his book comes with a handy, cut-out-and-keep five-point plea for their continued existence – but by telling stories. He begins with the library of King Ashurbanipal, the institution at the heart of the Assyrian empire, a realm already centuries old by the time the Greek historian Xenophon gazed at the spot in Mesopotamia where the ancient city of Nineveh had once stood (in the 19th century, 28,000 clay tablets were retrieved from what remained of this library, artefacts that represent a revolution in the documentation of knowledge). After this, he then leaps on, crossing continents, cantering through the centuries.
Here is John Leland, traversing Tudor England, enabling us to glimpse the contents of the monastic libraries shortly before they were destroyed by Henry VIII. Here is the burning of the library of Louvain University in 1914, in what is now Belgium, by the invading German army. And here is the National Library in Sarajevo, aflame for three days in 1992, due to incendiaries fired by Serbian militia. By learning what was lost, and how, and why, we come to see how vitally indispensable libraries and archives are; to grasp some, if not all, of the ways in which they inform and sustain us.
However, I was most forcefully struck by the way that history repeats itself. The burning of Sarajevo’s library took place less than 50 years after the end of the second world war, when the Nazis embarked on one of the most concerted eradications of books ever to take place (it’s chastening, to put it mildly, to read that a German librarian, Wolfgang Herrmann, was among those who compiled a helpful list of banned authors); and even now, the ruination goes on. The libraries of the Zaydi community in Yemen are a unique feature of its cultural life – Zaydism, a branch of Shia Islam, has a long and open-minded intellectual tradition – and are currently caught in the crossfire of its grim civil war.
And then there are the national archives of modern Iraq, a significant part of which have survived, thanks in large part to the extraordinary heroism of Kanan Makiya, an expatriate academic whose “obsession” with them brought him first to store some of these records in his parents’ house in Baghdad, and then to ensure their removal to a safe place. This is a long, complicated story, but it’s worth reading. As Ovenden quietly notes, archives are central to social order, to the ordering of history, and to the expression of national and cultural identity. In the case of Iraq, a country still mired in chaos, they’re crucial, in particular, to understanding the rise and fall of the Ba’ath party – and thus, they offer, perhaps, some modicum of hope. One day, the Iraqis will have the time and space to ask the deepest questions about what befell their country between 1968, when the Ba’athists assumed power, and the present day. Some of the answers they need will surely be found in this miraculous collection, now housed in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California.
Burning the Books by Richard Ovenden review – the libraries we have lost. By Rachel Cooke. The Guardian , August 31, 2020.
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