Next June 23rd we will renew the ancient rites of the solstice with bonfires that, at nightfall, take over from the sun; although the orderliness of a society that does not love the unpredictable means that there are fewer and fewer bonfires. This is not new either, Barcelona was always ordinance: when Cervantes visited Barcelona in June 1610, he confirmed that bonfires were prohibited within the city after the lack of control of one of them that was about to burn down the cathedral. The bonfires were made outside the city walls, on that beach where fishermen, smugglers and hustlers' huts were erected in disorder, which will be the seed of Barceloneta.
It was also a month of June 10 years ago that Ray Bradbury , the author of the novel Fahrenheit 451 , left us where the firefighters of the future , instead of putting out fires , set up barbecues with books and set them on fire with kerosene flamethrowers following the government orders. In his anticipatory gaze, he was right in the affective relationship of citizens through screens that have them absorbed, half a century before the internet existed. It is quoted more than it is read because it is not an entertaining fantasy thriller but a work of deep existential charge. Perhaps that apprehension of fire came from her ancestor Mary Bradbury, condemned to the stake for witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials held in the eighteenth century, although she narrowly escaped.
He did not anticipate the book bonfires: they have been burning books and libraries since the beginning of what we optimistically call “civilization”. There are documented book burnings in 213 BC. C. by order of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, little fond of the ideas of Confucius, or edicts of the Roman emperor Constantine I in the fourth century to systematically burn the books that echo the Arianist theories contrary to the Holy Trinity. The library of Alexandria became a monumental pyre due to Caliph Omar's decision because “if the books say the same thing as the Koran, they are not necessary. And if they say something other than the Koran, they are even more unnecessary”, although the documented book by Fernando Báez, New universal history of the destruction of books, published by Destino, points out the current doubts about this theory. The same of the Spaniards during the conquest of America instructed by the missionary Fray Diego de Landa to burn the wonderful Mayan codices.
The book bonfires that have remained in our retina the most are the burning of books in Germany in the spring of 1933 because we can see them on YouTube; the Nazis, propaganda aces, were in charge of making a precise filming. It is overwhelming to see with what impetus and fervor the students of the time threw the books of poets, thinkers and novelists at the stake... hundreds of authors banned by the Ministry of Propaganda of Joseph Goebbels. The first big bonfire burned on the Opernplatz in Berlin and then the arsonist rage spread throughout Germany. As if the planet itself were rebelling against this act against nature, that night in May it started to rain but when the masses are lit up by hymns, flags and nationalist supremacism, nothing turns them off. Firefighters were called in to douse the pyres with kerosene as if the novel Fahrenheit 451 was being written twenty years before Ray Bradbury dreamed of it in his nightmares.
A few days ago, my editor in Ukraine, Yulia Orlova, editorial manager of Kharkov-based Vivat, told me that “the intelligence service of the Ministry of Defense has shared information that libraries in the temporarily occupied territories have begun to exclude Ukrainian historical and fictional literature. The reason is that the books do not match the propaganda of the Kremlin and Russian military police units are doing that. In addition to the physical repressive functions, there is also an ideological repression. Copies of our book The Case of Vasyl Stus were confiscated or burned.” Don't let your guard down, this continues.
