Does posterity restore the dignity it deserves to every banned book such as Tacitus prophesied whilst watching a book burning 2000 years ago? Or do the flames even let some writings shine bright that otherwise would have remained in darkness?
Ovid was banned by Emperor Augustus, Kant can be found on the Vatican Index (but not Hitler). Some writers like Kafka wished for all their works to be burned after their death while other writers’ works were systematically destroyed so that no trace of them or their ideas should remain. Almost all of the classics from Goethe’s Werther via Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Proust’s Récherche to Joyces’ Ulysses, or Nabokov’s Lolita (first published by a French pornographic publisher’s as nobody wanted to publish it), have been ascribed to some extent with a turbulent prohibitive history and the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s were one of the first signs of what was to come.
But Fuld doesn’t just devote himself to the western world. He also focuses on China, Russia and the Islamic countries. Worldwide the list of banned books is almost endless and new ones are continually being added to it. This is reason in itself to devote a book to them and their stories at long last.
Fuld tells the entertaining, maddening and enlightening universal history of forbidden books, from antiquity to modern times. He tells stories of censorship and self-censorship, of destroyed libraries, the fight over manuscripts, of fundamentalists keen on banning and forbidding books, and shrewd publishers and resourceful authors who think of ways to overcome the prohibition. And it asks the question whether it is at all possible to completely destroy a book that was once published or eradicate an idea that was once uttered.
‘Werner Fuld’s Das Buch der verbotenen Bücher is an important chapter in the history of reading. He reminds us that behind every library there is a kind of shadow library full of forbidden, condemned, burnt, destroyed and almost forgotten books.’ (Alberto Manguel)
