Banned books in Germany: the 1933 book burnings and what is restricted today

Germany is home to one of history's most notorious book bans, the Nazi book burnings of 1933, and today has some of the most specific rules in Europe on what may be sold. Most books are freely available. A few kinds of material are restricted for minors or are illegal to distribute. This page explains both, in plain language. It's general information, not legal advice.

The book burnings of 10 May 1933

A few months after the Nazis took power, students organised by the German Student Union burned books in Berlin and in university towns across the country. In Berlin, the fire was on Opernplatz, now Bebelplatz, opposite the university. The targets were books by Jewish, pacifist, socialist and other authors the regime called "un-German". Among them: Heinrich Mann, Erich Kästner (who watched his own books burn), Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Kurt Tucholsky, and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

A century earlier, the poet Heinrich Heine, whose books were also burned in 1933, had written a line now quoted at the site: "Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people." Since 1995, Micha Ullman's memorial Bibliothek has marked the spot on Bebelplatz: a window set into the ground over a room of empty white bookshelves, with room for about 20,000 books.

What is restricted today

• The youth-protection index. A federal agency (today the Bundeszentrale für Kinder- und Jugendmedienschutz) can place books, films, games and other media on a list of media harmful to young people. Listed media may not be sold or shown to minors, advertised publicly, or displayed openly in shops. Adults can usually still buy them on request. This is a restriction for minors, not a ban on owning the book.
• Criminal law. Separately, the Criminal Code makes it an offence to publicly incite hatred against groups (§ 130, Volksverhetzung, which also covers denying the Holocaust), and to distribute propaganda of banned unconstitutional organisations (§ 86). Material can be seized when a court finds that it breaks these laws. These laws concern distribution and public statements; they don't generally make it a crime to own a book.
• Court orders. As anywhere, courts can stop the sale of a particular book, for example over invasion of privacy or defamation.

Mein Kampf

A common question. After the war the state of Bavaria held the copyright and refused to allow new German editions. When the copyright expired at the end of 2015, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich published a scholarly, annotated edition in 2016, and it sold widely. Selling old copies and the annotated edition is legal; distributing it as propaganda is not. This catalogue doesn't list the book.

Books in this catalogue with a German connection

• All Quiet on the Western Front: burned in 1933, banned in Nazi Germany.
• German Secret Weapons of the Second World War and the other books on the secret aircraft shelf.
• More from the period in the history of book banning.

Why some titles aren't listed here

Banned Bookshelf is run from Germany. Some books that circulate elsewhere, notably Holocaust-denial titles, aren't listed, because distributing or promoting them can be a crime here. See are banned books really banned? for how bans differ between countries.