32 The New York ReviewDangerous Ideas:
A Brief History of Censorship
in the West, from the
Ancients to Fake News
by Eric Berkowitz.
Beacon, 308 pp., $29.95According to Eric Berkowitz’s Danger-
ous Ideas, the first public book burning
in recorded history likely occurred in
430 BCE. Because the Sophist philos-
opher Protagoras questioned the ex-
istence of the gods, who had inflicted
defeats in war and a devastating pes-
tilence on Athens, his fellow citizens
wanted to appease them by incinerat-
ing his sacrilegious writings.
Two hundred years after Protagoras’s
works were devoured by flames, Chinese
scrolls and wooden tablets suffered the
same fate during the reign of Qin Shi
Huang.^1 In Imperial Rome books were
burned assiduously, including many
Christian texts, and then pagan texts
once the emperor Constantine con-
verted to Christianity in the fourth cen-
tury. A religion “rent by its own internal
battles,” Berkowitz writes, required fiery
measures to ensure orthodoxy and a uni-
fied church, which “became the model
for speech suppression for centuries to
come.” And so the pyres continued to
blaze, through the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, the Reformation and the
Counter- Reformation, the Enlighten-
ment and the Industrial Age, and reach-
ing, shamefully, into our own times.
Fire’s sheer destructiveness and ca-
pacity for spectacle make it dear to cen-
sors, as exemplified by two of the most
infamous cases of book burning in
recent centuries. The first comes from
the United States, where in 1873 An-
thony Comstock persuaded Congress
to enact laws making it illegal to send
lascivious materials through the mail.
As a postal inspector, and with the help
of mobs associated with his New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice,
Comstock claimed to have burned 160
tons of obscene literary material in the
forty-year period following passage of
the so-called Comstock laws, as well as
illustrated playing cards, sex toys, mar-
riage guides, and abortion and birth
control devices.^2
The second example is the notorious
Nazi bonfires in 1933 that turned to
cinders and smoke hundreds of thou-
sands of books, including “degenerate”
works by Marx, Mann, Proust, and
Einstein. Both at the time and subse-
quently, this was so widely condemned
that it seemed no one would dare torepeat it, or at least would not film
and display it to the world. And yet in
Chile, forty years later, that is exactly
what happened after the coup against
the democratically elected president
Salvador Allende. Watching television
in September 1973, I saw soldiers cast-
ing books on a smoldering pyre, among
which was my own How to Read Don-
ald Duck, an experience that helped
convince me, as it has authors over the
ages, that it was necessary to go into
exile lest I endure the same mistreat-
ment. Heinrich Heine expressed it best
in 1823: “Where they burn books, they
will ultimately burn people also.” Eight
years later, he went into exile in Paris to
escape German censorship.Exiles appear throughout Dangerous
Ideas^3 ; Berkowitz observes that those
who flee their oppressive homelands
can air their views abroad, but he does
not engage with the paradox that exile
also limits the influence that émigrés
can exercise back home, which turns
banishment into yet another deterrent
in the arsenal of censorship. What
Berkowitz does describe abundantly
are other punishments: publishers are
chopped to pieces and scholars are
buried alive, bishops are beheaded and
scribes are crucified for copying a de-
rogatory book, translators are knifed
and plays are shuttered, the Talmud
is put on trial and songs are banned,
reports are redacted, cinema content
is restricted, books are used as toilet
paper, references to sex are excised as
obscene, and workers are forbidden toread what affluent members of society
peruse at their leisure. During World
War I an unregistered alien in America
was even imprisoned because his par-
rot spoke German (“the bird [was] sent
to... a ‘loyal’ pet store”).
Given how repetitive these actions
are, one might expect Berkowitz’s
book to be tedious, but it always man-
ages to surprise, especially with a lively
flow of villains. Among those I hadn’t
come across, a few stood out. Frederick
Mead, the magistrate at proceedings in
1929 against the English gallery that
exhibited D. H. Lawrence’s watercol-
ors (in which pubic hair peeked out at
visitors), refused to hear testimony that
they constituted art, thundering that
“I would destroy these pictures, as I
would destroy wild beasts.” Eight years
later, the president of the British Board
of Film Censors boasted, “We may
take pride in observing that there is not
a single film in London today which
deals with any of the burning questions
of the day.” The nineteenth-century
Spanish general Ramón Narváez de-
clared, “It is not enough to confiscate
papers; to finish with bad newspapers
you must kill all the journalists.”
Malesherbes, the chief censor in
eighteenth-century France, intervened
to help the circulation of ideas of re-
ligious tolerance and social criticism,
but he seems to have been an outlier.^4
It would have served Berkowitz well to
spend more time on the enforcers im-
plementing these policies of silencing,
because they are crucial to the history
of censorship. Rather than admitting
that they act on behalf of oligarchs,politicians, and religious potentates de-
termined to keep their hold on power,
these censors often perceive themselves
as protecting the land and its most vul-
nerable members—women, children,
the poor—from corrosion and corrup-
tion, paternally sheltering them from
scandalous and disturbing emotions
and pictures.
And yet the interaction between cen-
sors and those they suppress can be
complex, as illustrated by an encoun-
ter I had with one of these guardians
in the late 1970s while I was in exile
in Holland. A compilation of my short
stories was under contract with Auf-
bau, a prestigious East German pub-
lishing house, so my wife and I crossed
into foreboding East Berlin to discuss
the final contents with my editor. Over
lunch, he explained that only one of
the stories would not appear in the
collection. Before he named it, I knew
it had to be “Reader.” Its protagonist,
Don Alfonso, an eagle-eyed censor
serving a Latin American dictatorship,
receives the manuscript of a treason-
ous novel whose main character seems
based on his own life, revealing his
most secret desires. Ultimately, rather
than suppressing that story—akin to
suffocating his own image in a mir-
ror—he allows it to circulate, putting
himself and his son in danger.
Though I may have been naive to
think that such a tale could be pub-
lished under a regime that was restrain-
ing speech in the name of the victorious
proletariat, I nevertheless trusted that
my editor would find a way to include
it. He did not lack courage, having
fought for the Spanish Republic and
then against Hitler, and I knew that he
respected literature that was not typical
social- realist fare. But when I asked him
what was wrong with the story, he cited
aesthetic arguments: it was stylistically
awkward, not well constructed. Why
embarrass him by pointing out that
the real reason behind his decision was
political, that my fiction, inspired by
events in my native Chile, could be con-
strued as criticism of the government
to which he had pledged allegiance?
He had Schere im Kopf (scissors in the
head)—a phrase that Berkowitz quotes
about censors in East Germany.
I did not, however, valiantly withdraw
my truncated collection from Aufbau.
Choosing compromise over confron-
tation, I opted not to forfeit the rest of
the stories by defending one of them.
That sort of calculation also forms part
of the history of censorship. There are
innumerable authors who have accom-
modated themselves to the strictures of
the state or worked their way around
them. One cannot fully grasp how the
struggle for free expression has devel-
oped without taking into account such
maneuvers, the kind I would have to
learn when I was allowed, a few years
later, to return to dictatorial Chile.History is full of writers wondering
how far they can go, which themes to
avoid or disguise, how to frame what
is said as allegorical or transpiring in
distant lands or future times; painters
wondering how much to depict; singers
gauging what might land them in jail;The Futility of Censorship
Ariel Dorfman
Illustration by Oliver Munday(^1) This “First Emperor” was praised and
emulated by Mao thousands of years
later as he wreaked havoc on his coun-
try’s intellectuals and libraries during
the Cultural Revolution, boasting that
he had far outdone his predecessor. See
John A. Lynn, Another Kind of War:
The Nature and History of Terrorism
(Yale University Press, 2019).
(^2) The figure of 160 tons comes from
Margaret A. Blanchard, “The Amer-
ican Urge to Censor: Freedom of Ex-
pression Versus the Desire to Sanitize
Society—From Anthony Comstock to
2 Live Crew,” William and Mary Law
Review, Vol. 33, No. 3 (March 1992).
(^3) Aristotle, Ovid, Dante, Tyndale, Vol-
taire, Joyce, Brecht, Rushdie, and many
more are mentioned but, strangely, no
female authors, such as the Algerian
novelist Assia Djebar or the Cuban
poet Lourdes Casal.
(^4) For more on the collaboration between
bureaucrats and writers in that time,
see Robert Darnton, Censors at Work:
How States Shaped Literature (Norton,
2014); reviewed in these pages by Timo-
thy Garton Ash, October 23, 2014.
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