The sunken library
Empty shelves below ground for 20,000 books.
Leonhard Lenz — CC0 · Leonhard Lenz — CC0 · Leonhard Lenz — CC0 · Leonhard Lenz — CC0
It is a square glass panel set flush into the paving near the middle of the square, with no raised edge or large sign — so many people walk over it without noticing, which is part of the point. Look down in the centre of the square, and you will find a small bronze plaque with the Heine quotation beside it. Night is better, since the room below is lit and shows clearly.
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Bebelplatz is a rectangular square opening off Unter den Linden, framed by three major neoclassical buildings: the State Opera, Humboldt University's old library, and St Hedwig's Cathedral with its round dome. The ensemble was planned in the eighteenth century as the Forum Fridericianum, a cultural centre for the kingdom on a Roman model. But the square is known worldwide because of one night: on 10 May 1933, Nazi students gathered some twenty thousand books from Berlin's libraries and burned them here — works by Jewish, communist and liberal authors, from Freud and Marx to Erich Kastner, who stood in the crowd and watched his own books burn. The memorial to that night is Berlin's cleverest and hardest to notice: a glass panel set into the paving through which you look down into an empty white room below ground, lined with bare bookshelves sized for twenty thousand volumes — nothing to see but the void. Beside it a small plaque carries Heinrich Heine's line, written in 1820: where they burn books, they will in the end burn people.
Empty shelves below ground for 20,000 books.
Opera, library and cathedral on one square.
Bebelplatz, 10117 Berlin