So among the books I've picked up recently is Richard Ovenden's Burning The Books, about book burnings throughout history. On the first page of actual text, we get a description of the night of 10/05/1933, when the texts of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft were burnt by Nazis

Looking in the index, this opening page is the only mention of the Institut in the book. It briefly mentions that among the books burnt, both in Berlin and in other locations, were from gay authors, but...it leaves me wondering.

See, this event, the 1933 book burnings, are important, and they began with an attack on the Institut on 6/05/1933. The Institut was also, notably, a pioneering location for trans studies, carrying out some of the world's first reassignment surgeries.

It was also an important centre for studying sex, and particularly gay and lesbian love. It's library was unique around the world...and it was destroyed.

Stories from LGBTQ's people's lives at the time, the detailed notes on sex reassignment surgery procedures, all the studies...they were all destroyed by the German Student Union.

The book agrees that this was a super important event, and even discusses how a bust of the Institut's founder, Magnus Hirschfield, was carried cermonially to be thrown upon the flames by the nazi students carrying out the burning so...

It is weird that this is the only time the book, as far as I can find, chooses to examine these events, particularly in a time when so many are turning against trans rights in particular and across the world LGBT rights are under threat.

This is not a callout for the author or his editors. I do not believe this was maliciously intended; this is the incident chosen to introduce the entire book, and other victims of the nazis are covered in later chapters.

There is also a single superscript 1, pointing towards a note in the section at the end of the book, which in turn mentions that if you want to learn about the Institut, see The Hischfield Archives by Heiker Bauer, a text I may try to track down myself.

However, I think it is important to think about these gaps in what we tell and the narratives we create. There's only so much you can put in a book, true, but this is what he chooses to start the entire book with; the image of the head of the institut's bust being set alight.

Information is lost not just through deliberate acts of book burning, but also simply through what we don't tell, what gets left behind, sometimes deliberately. The choices we make in what we choose to tell matters.

"Burning the Books" opens with the famous quote from Heinrich Heine: "Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings."

In the attack on the institut, the Nazis left a number of books unburnt; specifically the membership records that held the addresses and details of those patients and researchers who used the institut.

The path to burning human beings was very short indeed.

Perhaps the actual content of the first big Nazi book burning is avoided in discussions about book burning because it means you need to handle the awkward fact that those targeted were still arrested under the allies in both West and East Germany.

1920's and 30's Berlin were far more open to queer identities, partially due to the work of the institute, and the Nazi's targeted it for being "degenerate", declaring that they were returning to an utterly imaginary, murderous "pure" past.

"Burning The Books" discusses, among other things, how the burning of libraries is not just a symbolic act, but a brutally practical one for ripping out the knowledge base of those you declare others.

When people ignore why the Nazis attacked the institute, or, as some transphobes have, directly use the attack on the Institute and the other 1933 pyres as a metaphor to attack trans people with, that history continues to burn away.