Humboldt and Gaza – Berlin Bulletin #222
www.workers.org
By Victor Grossman Berlin This is No. 222 of the Berlin Bulletin, which Victor Grossman has been writing for decades. Grossman left the U.S. Armed Forces in the early 1950s by swimming to the Soviet Zone from the U.S.-occupied zone of Vienna, Austria. The Soviet authorities took him to E

It was May 10 in Germany’s terrible year 1933. Hitler had been in power for hardly three months when students and staff emptied the university libraries of forbidden books and threw them, an estimated 20,000 books by over a hundred authors, into the flames of a giant bonfire. Most authors were German — Jewish, atheist, liberal and leftist: Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers, Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld, but also some foreign works were thrown into the flames — Maxim Gorki, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, John Dos Passos.

Ninety-one years later, this May 3, just across Berlin’s famous Unter den Linden boulevard and in the same university courtyard where those books had once been dragged from, some of today’s students — courageous, determined, the total opposite of the [Third Reich] of 1933 — were forcibly hauled away to waiting police vans. The students of 1933 were advocating murder, preparing for the genocide which was to follow. These students of 2024 are protesting against murder and genocide.

The mayor and the authorities claimed that forbidden Hamas slogans were called out, justifying their brutal cuffing and arrests. It is possible that some Arab participants, emotionally moved by news and the pictures from Gaza, may have generalized these feelings. Who knows? And does it matter? This group was not antisemitic; it also included Jewish students, a few of them […] exiles [from Zionism’s neocolony].