For the 75th anniversary of an infamous Nazi book burning (see Quillblog passim), Canadian writer Stan Persky attended a memorial service in Berlin on Saturday. “I was one of a couple hundred people scattered on spectators’ benches set before a makeshift stage where the modest program of commemorative speeches, readings, and music meandered through a lazy afternoon,” Persky writes in a piece for The Tyee. He also delves into the history of the mass burning, touches on Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and makes some mildly depressing observations:
There’s one other thing to say about book burning, reading, memory, and forgetting. When I first came to Berlin, almost two decades ago, and rode the subway, the first thing I noticed was that invariably about 80 per cent of the passengers were reading. Everything from weighty tomes to their day planners. Never had I seen a culture that was so visibly engaged in reading.
Between then and now, as we know, reading, especially book reading, has precipitously declined. Sure, when I ride the Berlin subway today, a few people besides myself may be perusing a book. But now there are news and advertising screens installed at each end of every subway car for riders to stare at; people are busy yattering into their cellphones (or “Handys” as they’re calleed here); and ubiquitous iPod earphones are delivering sounds into transit passengers’ youthful heads. It looks like we’ve found a more effective means to displace reading than the bonfires of the Nazis or Bradbury’s book-burning firemen. Why use violence when you can get people to forget about reading through sheer cultural indifference?
