Bebelplatz: Frederick's Forum and the Empty Library
Why is it significant?
Walk to the middle of the cobbled square and look down. Set into the stones is a square pane of glass, and beneath it, deep below your feet, a white room lined with shelves. Every single shelf is empty.
Key Facts
| Place | Bebelplatz: Frederick's Forum and the Empty Library |
|---|---|
| Address | Bebelplatz, 10117 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.51650, 13.39380 |
| Part of Walk | Kings, Domes and Empty Shelves: Museum Island & Prussian Berlin |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk to the middle of the cobbled square and look down. Set into the stones is a square pane of glass, and beneath it, deep below your feet, a white room lined with shelves. Every single shelf is empty.
Before we come to that room, look around you, because this square was meant to be a royal masterpiece. Frederick the Great planned it as his Forum Fridericianum. On one side stands the opera house, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, opened in 1742 by a young king who loved music and played the flute himself. Opposite is the curved Old Library, which Berliners nicknamed the chest of drawers. And in the corner rises the round dome of Saint Hedwig's, a Catholic cathedral that the Protestant king allowed after he had conquered Catholic Silesia.
On the evening of the 10th of May 1933, this square was filled with fire. Nazi-organised students carried books here from the libraries and threw around twenty thousand of them onto a bonfire. Joseph Goebbels gave a speech. Works by Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Erich Maria Remarque and many others went into the flames. The writer Erich Kästner stood in the crowd and watched his own books burn.
In 1995 the Israeli artist Micha Ullman created the memorial under your feet. He called it simply Library, and the empty shelves have room for about twenty thousand books, the number that burned. Nearby, a plaque quotes a line Heinrich Heine wrote more than a century earlier, in a play: where books are burned, in the end people will be burned too. At night the room glows from below like a light that cannot be put out.
A forum built to show off the Enlightenment of a philosopher king, and a square where that Enlightenment was set on fire. Both stories belong here. Now walk past the side of the opera house and head south-east, towards a tall red-brick church with two square towers.