'Learning, Loveliness, Devotion, Labor, Love!'

When German troops invaded neutral Belgium on August 19, 1914, they set fire to the Louvain University Library, destroying the buildings and their contents (more than 300,000 volumes). The library had been founded in 1425, the first in what is now Belgium. Fr. Eugène Dupiéreux, a Jesuit living in Louvain at the time, wrote in his journal:

 

“Until today I had refused to believe what the newspapers said about the atrocities committed by the Germans; but in Leuven I have seen what their Kultur is like. More savage than the Arabs of Caliph Omar, who burnt down the Alexandrian library, we see them set fire, in the twentieth century, to the famous University Library.”

 

The library was rebuilt after World War I, largely with funds raised in the United States. Libraries around the world donated duplicate volumes to help restock the shelves. In 1940, German bombs again destroyed the library. Richard Ovenden, director of the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, in 2020 published Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge. Go here to read an excerpt recounting the burning of the library at Louvain:

 

“Not only would the lesson of Louvain not be learned in the aftermath of the First World War, it would have to be taught again in the second. On the night of May 16, 1940, almost 26 years after the first destruction of the library, the reconstructed building was again mostly destroyed, and again it was the German armed forces that targeted and bombed it.”

 

The library was rebuilt and reopened in 1950 and thus far has remained intact. In the Winter 2004 issue of Sewanee Review, Catharine Savage Brosman published a ten-stanza poem, “Burning in Louvain: August 1914-November 1917,” later collected in Breakwater (Mercer University Press, 2009). The unnamed narrator is a scholar:

 

“The manuscripts,

the books that turned to ash--five hundred years

of learning, loveliness, devotion, labor, love!

From that I’d made my life; they burnt my heart

 

“along with parchments.”

 

He has taken home a manuscript from the library and carries it with him as he flees Louvain. On the way he finds an iron chest, stows the manuscript inside and buries it in a forest. Brosman concludes her poem:

 

    “As if my work

 

“ had been fulfilled that night, I’ll not survive,

I think--too old, too ill--this awful war.

Indeed it may not end, but drag itself

from Ypres and Verdun to Passchendaele,

devouring everything, toward God knows what

unthinkable catastrophe, until

the last of Europe's blood and mind are gone,

as men decay, dissolve, or burn with books

 

“they would not honor. All seems useless now--

the scribe's long labor, my impulsive act--

amid the ruins. I cannot retrieve

the manuscript; the very woods may be

consumed and greater clouds of evil choke

the world, from thought turned diabolical,

as madmen light a pyre of words and flesh,

and set the stream of charity on fire.”

 

As Heine suggested and Brosman observes, when men burn books, the burning of humans can’t be far behind. Entropy is a book burner but nothing compared to garden-variety human perversity.