Sir, – You report (News, April 29th) that the family of WB Yeats has kindly donated to the National Library his Nobel Prize in Literature medal awarded to him in 1923.
I wonder, however, whether many of your readers are aware of a much more controversial award made to and accepted by Yeats, namely, the Goethe-Plakette conferred on him in 1934 for his play, The Countess Cathleen.
Although the Nazis would some years later come to ban his works, in June 1934 Yeats was willing to accept this plaque, despite the well-publicised bibliocaust in May and June 1933 overseen by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
There in the centre of Berlin, at the Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Platz, an estimated 25,000 books considered by the regime to be “un-German” and “degenerate” were thrown on to the fires, including the works of James Joyce and of countless other world-renowned poets and writers such as Heinrich Heine, Erich Kästner, Heinrich Mann, and Erich Maria Remarque.
To have accepted this award knowing it was being conferred on him by a totalitarian regime that had orchestrated this bibliocaust just a year previously is surely not an act one might have expected from a Noble literature laureate?
– Yours, etc,
IVOR SHORTS
Rathfarnham,
Dublin 16.