The Librarian of Burned Books, page 33
Even in the darkest times, though, there is always light to be found.
For me, that was stumbling onto the libraries in Paris and Brooklyn. Not much about them has survived the passing of time beyond a few articles from when they opened, a Wikipedia entry or two, and a handful of scholarly articles that I probably contributed about half the hits to. In fact, the libraries were often just throwaway mentions in the larger context of censorship efforts of the time period. They had famous patrons and supporters—H. G. Wells and the Mann brothers in Paris and Einstein and Upton Sinclair in Brooklyn, among many, many others—but they have been mostly forgotten by history. Still, I was immediately enchanted by the idea of them because they represent the very best of what we can be when we approach the world with empathy, curiosity, and wonder instead of fear, hatred, and intolerance.
It’s easy to look into the past and see the impulse to destroy books as deeply human and inevitable, but so is our desire to protect them.
In 2022, both the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library launched programs to make commonly banned books available to people across the country who might not have access to them otherwise. A small island library in Maine made it its mission to fill its shelves with the books that have made all those banned lists. A group of moms in Ohio created a website with maps to track books being challenged across the country.
There is always light to be found.
It’s hard to ignore that many of the challenges we’re seeing are targeted toward queer books and authors. I didn’t intend to write a sapphic love story when I first came up with the idea for The Librarian, and yet the moment Hannah made her appearance on the page—riding her bike, heartbroken and tough as nails, through the streets of Paris—I knew she had been in love with Althea.
Once that was decided, I went into a research spiral that landed me in inter-war Berlin and Paris, where, I joyously discovered, queer communities not only existed but flourished.
In Berlin in particular, there were the cabarets and night clubs, of course, but there were also popular films and hit songs and magazines that all featured the queer experience. Magnus Hirschfeld, the man whose institute was raided by the fascists before the book burnings, was decades ahead of his time with his research into the queer identity. People lived out in the open in a way that wasn’t really seen again for decades. To read more about this time period in the city, I suggest Gay Berlin by Robert Beachy.
While Paris in the thirties wasn’t quite at Berlin levels, there was a vibrant community there that was accessible to queer residents. Le Monocle in Montmartre was one of the earliest and most famous sapphic nightclubs in Paris, and lesbian Natalie Clifford Barney did, in fact, host a weekly literary salon at her house on the Left Bank, drawing the likes of Gertrude Stein, among many others.
We’re often told that trauma and pain are indelible parts of any LGBTQ historical story, so much so that joyful queer romances set in the past are sometimes deemed unrealistic or fantastical. While our scars can’t be denied, they shouldn’t erase the fact that there was happiness and love there, too. Queer people have always been able to “curiously wander through a thousand wonders” and see more than just the banal at the end.
On to the broader points of history mentioned throughout: Almost all of the events and historical figures are, to the best of my knowledge, accurately portrayed. But because I am very, very human, I am sure there are a few errors that I inserted by mistake. My apologies in advance.
I chose to set Althea’s point of view in the first half of 1933 not only because of the book burnings, but because so much happened so quickly in that specific chunk of time that I’ve always been fascinated by those months. If I’d included all the ways they set Germany on the path toward the war and the holocaust, this would have become a textbook. But if you’re interested in the early days of Hitler’s rise to power, I highly recommend the Great Courses that I’ve included in the Dive Deeper section.
While much of the focus in history tends to be on Hitler’s male enablers, I did want to include Helene Bechstein, of Bechstein piano fame. Helene and rich, powerful women like her tutored her “little wolf” on table manners and other etiquette, and helped him navigate Berlin’s upper echelon—a crucial part of him being accepted by the high society donors who would help him into power. Women are so often scrubbed out of historical context that it’s easy to forget the roles we can play in the crucial moments that shape humanity—for better, yes, but also for worse. We should not forget.
It should also be mentioned that Hannah’s fears about Otto’s assassination fantasies were based on real-life events that occurred long after Hannah would have fled Paris. In 1938, Herschel Feibel Grynszpan shot a German diplomat, and the Nazis used the incident as a pretense to launch Kristallnacht.
Now, while much of the historical backdrop of The Librarian hews closely to real-life events, one of the bigger alterations I made—besides adding a hefty amount of drama to the final showdown with Taft—was with Goebbels’s cultural exchange program. While he was in charge of setting the cultural agenda for Hitler’s Reich, I created that specific initiative as a way to get Althea into the grasp of the Nazis.
I do hope that some of the history in The Librarian has piqued your interest, but at the end of the day, more than anything, I hope the story moved you, resonated with you, made you laugh or cry or have that tightening in your chest that can only be described as a million different feelings at once.
As New York Times bestselling author Jewell Parker Rhodes says, “I love historical fiction because there’s a literal truth, and there’s an emotional truth, and what the fiction writer tries to create is that emotional truth.”
My ultimate goal is to have done that for you.
Thank you so much for reading.
Books from the Book
Below is a list of all the books mentioned in The Librarian of Burned Books, besides the two fictional Althea James novels.
Armed Services Editions
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Candide, Voltaire
Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
Wind, Sand and Stars, Antione de Saint-Exupéry
Tortilla Flat, John Steinbeck
Strange Fruit, Lillian Smith
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
Chicken Every Sunday, Rosemary Taylor
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Others
The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Reinmar von Hagenau’s poetry collection
Too Busy To Die, H. W. Roden
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes
Parnassus on Wheels, Christopher Morley
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Ivanhoe, Walter Scott
Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
One Thousand and One Nights
Dive Deeper into History
For more information on the historical events that inspired The Librarian of Burned Books check out some of the sources I used to research the novel below.
Books
When Books Went to War, Molly Guptill Manning
Books as Weapons, John B. Hench
The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, Anders Rydell
The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood
The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett
In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson
Gay Berlin, Robert Beachy
Articles
Leary, William M. “Books, Soldiers and Censorship during the Second World War.” American Quarterly
Von Merveldt, Nikola. “Books Cannot Be Killed by Fire: The German Freedom Library and the American Library of Nazi-Banned Books As Agents of Cultural Memory.” John Hopkins University Press
Appelbaum, Yoni. “Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II.” The Atlantic
“Paris Opens Library of Books Burnt by Nazis.” The Guardian Archives
Whisnant, Clayton J. “A Peek Inside Berlin’s Queer Club Scene Before Hitler Destroyed It.” The Advocate
“Between World Wars, Gay Culture Flourished in Berlin.” NPR’s Fresh Air
More
The Great Courses: A History of Hitler’s Empire, Thomas Childers
“Hitler: YA Fiction Fan Girl,” Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards Podcast
Magnus Hirschfeld, Leigh Pfeffer and Gretchen Jones, History Is Gay Podcast
“Das Lila Lied,” composed by Mischa Spoliansky, lyrics by Kurt Schwabach
Book Club Discussion Questions
Did you know about the Armed Service Editions or the burned books libraries before reading The Librarian of Burned Books? Was there anything you learned that was surprising to you about either?
Each point of view (Althea, Viv, and Hannah) is set in a distinct location and time period. What role does the year and city play in each character’s development throughout the novel?
Alice in Wonderland comes up frequently. Do you think the themes in that story are reflected in Althea’s time in Berlin? How so?
Did you enjoy the way book quotes were layered into the scenes throughout the novel? Did they add to the story for you? Was there any one in particular that resonated with you?
Throughout the novel, Hannah struggles with the idea of resisting the Nazis through the power of words versus resisting with violence. Is there ever a time when violence becomes necessary? Is everyone capable of being pushed that far?
In Chapter 5, Hannah tells Viv that the reason the Brooklyn library is so important is to protect the Jewish culture: “Books are a way we leave a mark on the world, aren’t they?” They say we were here, we loved and we grieved and we laughed and we made mistakes and we existed.” Do you agree with that statement, and do you see that reflected in the kinds of books that have been banned in recent years?
Viv views her quest as essentially telling a compelling story to get voters behind her cause. How was that tactic used by both sides in other ways in World War II? Do you see it being employed in today’s politics?
Was it uncomfortable to read Althea’s early chapters when she was enchanted by the Nazis? Did you judge her for not realizing what they were sooner? Do you think it would be easy or difficult to break free from an ideology if you had been in her position?
How much did you know about Berlin’s night life and its queer community? Were the scenes surprising in any way? Did you notice parallels to our current landscape in both the openness and acceptance of the progressive society and then the pushback that followed?
In Chapter 16, Hannah says, “Burning books about things you do not like or understand does not mean those things no longer exist.” Yet book burning has existed nearly since the beginning of mass-produced books themselves. Why is the strategy so common? And then, in the same chapter, Hannah says that it’s actually the books that weren’t burned that bother her the most because the Nazis used them to study the very people they wanted to erase. Which is more disturbing to you?
Is it ever morally justified to ban a book?
Were you surprised that the libraries included Mein Kampf on their shelves? Do you agree with their reasoning?
In Chapter 23, the women discuss how much difference one person can make, and whether small changes can add up to mean more than a grand gesture. How do you feel about individual politics versus collective action? Is one more effective than the other? And does the book reflect that discussion in the end or counter it?
Characters answer the question, “Do you have a favorite book?” differently throughout the novel. Does one answer in particular resonate with you? What is your favorite book (if you have one) and why?
Viv points out that it’s not always an author’s job to tell the truth. Rather it can simply be to entertain the readers. Do you agree or disagree?
Was Otto’s betrayal unforgivable? Would you have burned that bridge like Hannah did?
What did you think of the final speeches? Were there any lines that stuck out to you—for good or bad? Did you find Hannah’s and Althea’s complementary to each other, and if so, why? Did anything make you think of what’s going on in politics today?
Did you find the epilogue satisfying or do you wish you could have imagined your own complicated ending for the characters?
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE LIBRARIAN OF BURNED BOOKS. Copyright © 2023 by Brianna Labuskes. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Kerry Rubenstein
Cover photographs © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images (woman); © Shutterstock
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2023 ISBN: 978-0-06-325924-9
Version 12152022
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-325925-6
ISBN 978-0-06-329712-8 (hardcover library edition)
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Brianna Labuskes, The Librarian of Burned Books
