The Parthenon of Books was a full-size replica of the ancient Athenian temple built by Argentine artist Marta Minujín for documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany, in 2017. Its columns and pediment were made of steel scaffolding wrapped in clear plastic and covered with about 100,000 donated copies of books that have been banned somewhere in the world, past or present. It stood on Friedrichsplatz, the square where the Nazis burned around 2,000 books in May 1933.
The work combined three ideas in one striking image: the Parthenon as the symbol of Athenian democracy, books as the raw material of free thought, and a site in Germany scarred by censorship. Here is how it came about, which books were included, and what happened to them when the exhibition ended.
What the Parthenon of Books was
Minujín, born in Buenos Aires in 1943, has spent six decades making large, playful, often temporary public works. For Kassel she built a temple the size of the original Parthenon, which measures roughly 70 metres long and 10 metres high according to documenta's own description. Instead of marble, the structure used metal scaffolding. Each column was sheathed in books sealed inside plastic so that they would survive the summer weather and could later be handed out again.
Lit from within at night, the installation glowed like a lantern made of book spines. In daylight, visitors could walk between the columns and read the titles at eye level.
documenta 14 ran in two cities that year, Athens and Kassel, and the Kassel exhibition opened on 10 June 2017 for its usual 100 days. Pairing a Greek temple with a German square suited a festival built around the relationship between the two cities.
How the books were chosen and collected
The books were not bought in bulk. documenta issued a public call for donations, asking people to send copies of titles that are or were prohibited. To guide donors, researchers at the University of Kassel, including professors Nikola Roßbach and Florian Gassner, helped compile a list of more than 170 titles that have been banned or censored in different countries and periods.
The close-up above shows how dense the result was: each column held hundreds of volumes, attached to the scaffold one by one. As the project neared completion, documenta posted updates asking for more donations to finish the last pillars.
The list ranged across centuries and genres. Some titles were classics silenced by dictatorships; others are modern novels that have been challenged in school libraries. The American Library Association, for example, sent books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor and Jeff Smith and David Levithan's Two Boys Kissing, all of which have faced challenges in the United States.
Among the spines visible in this photo are Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Franz Kafka, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Cervantes' Don Quixote and a Harry Potter volume. Each has been banned, burned or removed from shelves somewhere, for reasons ranging from religious objections to political fear. The image is a good reminder that censorship is rarely limited to one kind of book.
Some reports said that Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, long restricted in Germany, was deliberately left off the list; we could not confirm that detail in documenta's own material, so treat it as reported rather than established.
Why Kassel's Friedrichsplatz mattered
The location was the heart of the artwork. In spring 1933, a few months after Hitler took power, the German Student Union organised a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit". Students and Nazi party members collected books by Jewish, left-wing, pacifist and other "undesirable" authors and burned them in public squares across Germany. Most of the burnings took place on 10 May 1933; Kassel's was delayed by rain until 19 May, when an estimated 2,000 books were thrown into the flames on Friedrichsplatz.
This aerial view shows the temple on Friedrichsplatz in front of the Museum Fridericianum, documenta's traditional main venue. Building a monument of forbidden books on the exact spot where books had been destroyed turned the square into a place of remembrance and defiance at the same time.
Among the works burned in 1933 were Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and books by Helen Keller. Keller answered with an open letter to German students that contained a line often quoted ever since: "History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas."
The first Parthenon of Books in Buenos Aires, 1983
Kassel's temple was a second, larger version of a work Minujín first made in her home city. In December 1983, as Argentina returned to democracy after the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, she built El Partenón de Libros on a median of Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires. It was made from books that the junta had banned, including works by Freud, Marx, Sartre, Foucault and even The Little Prince. Sources give the number of books as between about 20,000 and 30,000.
The Kassel temple by moonlight, photographed in summer 2017. Its silhouette echoed the Buenos Aires original, but at roughly 100,000 books it was several times larger. After a few weeks on display, cranes tipped the Buenos Aires structure over and the public was invited to take the books home. That gesture of returning forbidden books to readers became the template for the ending of the Kassel version.
Minujín has summed up the idea behind both versions simply: "Democracy without books is not democracy."
What happened to the 100,000 books
The Kassel temple was never meant to be permanent. documenta announced a public celebration of the completed collection on 9 September 2017 and, from 10 September, Minujín began redistributing the books to residents and visitors. People could leave with a volume that had once been forbidden somewhere, so the artwork ended by scattering its material into private homes.
These two views show the scale that made the work so photogenic: from the side, the colonnade looks almost solid; from the front, the gaps between the columns reveal the scaffolding and the sky behind.
J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, seen here wrapped in plastic on one of the columns, is one of the most frequently challenged novels in American schools, often over its language and themes. Its presence in Kassel made the point that censorship is not only a feature of distant dictatorships.
Why the work still resonates
The Parthenon of Books worked because it was easy to grasp and hard to forget. A temple associated with the birth of democracy, rebuilt from books someone tried to suppress, on a square where books were once burned, needs little explanation. Yet it also asked visitors to look closely: many titles on the columns were not obscure political pamphlets but familiar novels and children's books.
A few misunderstandings are worth clearing up. The work was not a ruin or a model; it was a full-size, temporary structure. Not every book on it was banned everywhere or at the same time; the list combined titles censored in different countries and eras. And it was not a one-off stunt: it continued an idea Minujín first realised in 1983, and she has since built other book monuments, such as a reclining Big Ben made of books shown in Manchester in 2021.
For readers, the takeaway is practical as well as symbolic. Book challenges continue today in schools and libraries around the world. Knowing which books have been targeted, and why, is the first step to deciding where you stand.
Sources: Photos by Roman März and Instagram users alexgorlin, si.leika, lctanner, rachelmijaresfick, jingyinc, voework and thegood.thebad.thebooks; documenta 14: The Parthenon of Books is taking shape in Kassel; Smithsonian Magazine: An artist is building a Parthenon of banned books; Dezeen: Parthenon of Books by Marta Minujín; Wikipedia: Marta Minujín; originally spotted via My Modern Met.
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