DESPITE BOOK-BURNING, JACK LONDON LIVES ON

On a recent trip to Bonn, Germany, our guide led us to a powerful memorial in the city’s Market Square where the Nazi Party had carried out one of the first of the regime’s Bucherverbrennung or Book Burnings on May 10, 1933.

To mark the 50^th anniversary of that infamous event, in May 1983, the then West German Capital unveiled a muted, but striking display of bronze book spines vertically placed amidst the rebuilt Square’s cobblestones. Recording the authors and titles of many of the volumes tossed onto the pyre, the density and impact of the display increases near the Rathaus or Town Hall steps where the actual book burning took place.

To keep the memorial ritually alive, on every May 10 since then, citations from burned books are read at a commemorative ceremony and copies of different books destroyed there are handed out to passer-byes.

As I scanned the Square for recognizable titles, one in particular seemed to leap out at me amidst the scatter of famous works lying among the stones. There was the very familiar Sonoma County name of Jack London engraved on the bronze spine of one of his most significant and radical works, The Iron Heel.

 Memorial to Jack London's The Iron Heel, Bonn, Germany

Credit: Les Adler

Suddenly the events of more than eighty years ago became even more intensely real and close to home. These were not simply random volumes tossed on the flames by Nazi fanatics or those caught-up in the fervor of the moment, but works deliberately chosen because of the ideas they carried. Ideas which, in fact, were truly subversive to the single-grained, hate-filled ideology of the Third Reich particularly because they expressed a belief in the indomitable human spirit and its continuous struggle for freedom and dignity.

This seems particularly significant now as we pause to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the life and work of Sonoma County’s and one of America’s most famous authors, Jack London, who died at the young age of 40 at his Glen Ellen ranch in November of 1916.

The Iron Heel, written in 1908, was one of London’s most radical and ultimately influential works. Written from the perspective of the far future, it described the doomed revolt of a band of rebels, based here in Sonoma County, struggling against the crushing weight of what he called ‘The Oligarchy’, essentially a corporate state dominated by ruthless capitalist forces. Recognizing the danger of concentrated wealth and power overwhelming the working class in his own time, London chronicled the potential triumph of modern authoritarian state power over the lone individual. His prescient work became the first and, arguably, the most influential in what later became the list of twentieth-century dystopian novels culminating in such classics as Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984.

Standing in Bonn’s Market Square in 2016, long after the flames meant to obliterate their words and ideas were doused--and even while still immersed in similar struggles for human rights and dignity--one could only feel thankful to London and those memorialized around him for the still vital testaments to the human spirit they left behind.

--Les Adler

Les Adler is Emeritus Professor of History

in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at

Sonoma State University.

This commentary first appeared in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, November 27, 2016.