TOUCH PAPER, 2021

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On 10 May 1933, students in 34 university towns across Germany burned more than 25,000 books. Book-burnings were aimed to instil the Nazi spirit within German culture, and to cleanse it of a ‘corrupting’ and so-called ‘Jewish influence’. The works of Jewish authors, which included Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud were thrown onto huge pyres, alongside those of blacklisted writers, such as Ernest Hemingway and Oscar Wilde. In Berlin, over 40,000 citizens gathered to hear the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels’s inflammatory speech.

Germany, May 1933

Poland, November 2021

On 11 November 2021, in Kalisz, Poland, a city with 100,000 inhabitants, a group of nationalists held an antisemitic rally in which they burned a book representing an historic pact protecting the rights of Jewish people in Poland. The crowd shouted “Death to the Jews, Jews out of Poland, No to Polin, yes to Poland ”.

“Dort, wo man Bucher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen”, Heinrich Heine, German Jewish poet, 1880. (When they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people)

Handcrafted miniature books sit atop a first edition English translation of The Oppermanns, and an early edition of Jew Suss, both by Lion Feuchtwanger. Feuchtwanger was an established German Jewish novelist and playwright; and a passionate critic of the Nazi Party long before it assumed power. He was targeted with government sponsored persecution, his house ransacked and his extensive library stolen. He was rendered stateless and left Germany in 1933.

Photo credit: Allan Smith

Measurement: 20cm x 14cm x 12cm

Process: Image manipulation, printing, cutting

Materials: Two early edition books, vintage matchbox, miniature books, paper, ink

Exhibited in:

Book, A Group Exhibition, online at organthing.com (From 22 February 2022)

Fabricated? Solo Exhibition, London, England (1 October 2024 - 15 February 2025)

COMMENTS

  • A sensitive concept superbly crafted

  • Such beautiful and considered and important work

  • Really like that you have photographed your miniatures on top of these books; as well as being very apposite, it also clearly shows the scale of your pieces.

  • The deliberate desecration of a culture, setting fire to accumulated wisdom is cultural savagery. What has the world lost?

  • You have once again created art that interrogates the danger of Populist ideology

  • Another thought provoking, beautifully executed piece of work

  • The Nazi Party understood the culture of their victims so well and put this knowledge to twist the knife of their racism deeper as in the Jewish culture of learning