The story of this place
On the night of 10 May 1933, in this square outside Berlin's university, Nazi students and the German Student Union hurled some 20,000 books onto a bonfire — works by Heine, Freud, Marx, Einstein, Brecht and countless 'un-German' authors. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels addressed the roaring crowd. A century earlier the poet Heinrich Heine had written the prophetic line, now inscribed on a plaque here: 'Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.' Since 1995 the square holds Micha Ullman's haunting memorial: a glass plate set into the cobbles looks down into a white underground room of empty bookshelves large enough for 20,000 volumes — the exact number destroyed that night.