An Auto-Da-Fé of the Mind: Joseph Roth and his Warnings, Then and Now

History may or may not repeat itself, but events can have precedents. In the 1930s, an exiled writer who made no claim to be a prophet saw the future, nonetheless.

The fire began at midnight on May 10^th, a cool Berlin night under drizzling rain. Cameras captured the floodlit crowds in Opera Square where university students had brought the ransacked contents of libraries, stores, and private collections to feed the flames.

Thousands marched singing Nazi anthems as they carried books to fuel the pyre. At a microphone, one after another named the immolated authors. Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, Stefan Zweig, Thomas and Heinrich Mann. The flames, one student declared, were purging German education of their smut and dishonesty. It was, Joseph Roth wrote later, an auto-da-fé of the mind.

A journalist and novelist, Roth reported on Weimar Germany and Europe for the Frankfurter Zeitung until 1933 when Hitler’s rise drove him into exile. A Jew, born in Austria Hungary and educated in Vienna, Roth was a veteran of World War I. Widely read, his compelling prose captured the everyday and the extraordinary. As a refugee, he continued to publish in Europe’s émigré outlets and to write novels, a hand-to-mouth existence that diminished the quality of neither his feuilletons nor his fiction.

Roth saw events in Germany clearly: a totalitarianism that used an election, the law, and the media to destroy a democracy as a continent turned a blind eye to the consequences. Writing to the novelist Stephan Zweig in January 1933 only days after Hitler became chancellor, his words were a warning. “The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.” Roth’s death in 1939 silenced his writing but not its relevance to understanding what ignoring attacks on democracy can bring.

An Auto-da-fé of the Mind, his October 1933 essay, spoke to Germany’s Jews whose contributions to the arts, literature, and science were only exceeded by their delusions about what was in store. For his fellow Jewish writers, then banned by Hitler’s regime, his admonitions were stark. As Nazi persecution grew, he acknowledged their appeals to Europe’s conscience. But, he argued, it was time to admit defeat and abandon pleas and protests that bore only false hopes.

“Let me say it loud and clear,” Roth wrote, “the European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination.” In a letter to one of his editors, he made plain his personal despair. “What use are my words,” he wrote, “against the guns, the loudspeakers, the murderers, the deranged ministers, the stupid interviewers and journalists who interpret the voice of this world of Babel via the drums of Nuremberg?”

And yet, as Morten Jensen highlights in his 2019 essay on the man and his work, Roth wrote, calling out the true meaning of Nazi actions. “If Jewish judges and attorneys are expelled or locked up,” Roth warned, “it represents a symbolic assault on law and justice. If authors with European reputations are exiled, it is a way of proclaiming one’s contempt for France and Britain. If communists are tortured, it carries the fight to the Russian and Slavic world.”

Roth knew the so-called “cleansing” of German literature that May night represented a choice of vocabulary with a meaning that extended beyond the act of book burning. His October 1933 essay made the point. “Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third Reich’s book burnings, expulsion of Jewish writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intellect actually mean.” As for Roth, his conclusion was plain. “All this means far more than the threatened and terrorized world seems to realize.”

The Europe of 1933 that heard the Third Reich’s declarations, of course, did not lack for warnings. The language of crisis was embedded in its emergency decrees as well as actions. That March, less than three months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act giving him unlimited power. In April, a law for “restoration” of the civil service purged Jews and communists from the courts, bureaucracy, and universities. Meanwhile, the regime seeded loyalists at all levels of government to oversee its decrees.

What befell the Jews, the courts, and the government all were legal acts. So, too, was what followed. Gleichschaltung, “coordination,” as it was labeled, replaced the purged with the party faithful, cementing the regime’s power in place. For the Nazis, time also was of the essence. Within two years, the Reichstag was gelded; judges who had failed to accept Nazi laws and principles were gone; and the Supreme Court was replaced by a new People’s Court with handpicked justices. As for the news media, they fell in line with barely a peep.

Roth left Berlin on January 30, 1933, the day Hitler was appointed Chancellor, never to return to Germany. A few weeks later in Paris, he wrote to Stephan Zweig, laying out his fear of another war. “It will have become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe.”

In exile, Roth grew increasingly disillusioned. “One must write,” he told his editors in 1934, “even when one realizes the printed word can no longer improve anything.” Disillusioned or not, Roth saw the implications of authoritarianism clearly, not only in chronicling the Nazis’ rise, but also in warning against harboring illusions that ignored the reality their words could bring.