Overviews of the Collections
The German Collections at the Library of Congress
Margrit B. Krewson, former German/Dutch Area Specialist
Revised and updated by David B. Morris, German Area Specialist,
January 2007
The Library of Congress German collections, the largest and most
diverse in North America, support research in all areas of intellectual
achievement. German-language holdings can be found throughout the
Library and represent some of the institution's best known and
most valuable collections. Works in all disciplines are included,
with special emphasis on German Americana. The historical collections
relating to German tribes, the medieval empire, and modern Germany
are numerous and important. Systematic histories of Germany, the
extensive collections devoted to politics, foreign relations and
diplomatic history, and primary materials in the public government
documents collection, as well as historical periodicals, enrich
these resources. The literature of travel is extensive, and is
supplemented by material for the individual German states, geographies,
guidebooks, and gazetteers. The Library's cartographic holdings
are particularly strong as they relate to Germany, as are its holdings
in the fields of German literature, intellectual life, business,
and science.
Nineteenth-Century Beginnings
The Library's German collections began with the acquisition of
Thomas Jefferson's personal library in 1815. Although Jefferson's
European interest was primarily France, he collected works from
other European countries, particularly works pertaining to America.
Jefferson stated that he had standing orders the whole time he
was in Europe, visiting its principal bookmarts, particularly in
Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Madrid, and London, "for such works relating
to America as could not be found in Paris." The following items
in Jefferson's library attest to his interest in the Germanic area: The Constitution and Government of the Germanic Body by Karl Friedrich Necker, Oeuvres complettes de Frederic II, Roi de Prusse, and Untersuchungen über Americka's Bevölkerung aus dem alten Kontinente by Johann Severin Vater, An Account of Switzerland by Abraham Stanyan, The Chemical Works of Caspar Neumann, A Treatise of Artillery by Heinrich Otto
von Scheel, and commentaries on religious works by Martin Luther.
Nevertheless,
no systematic attempt to develop a German collection was made until
1867, when the exchange of public documents with foreign governments
was authorized by a joint resolution of Congress. The Librarian
of Congress, Ainsworth Rand Spofford, recognized that the Library
was "greatly deficient" in foreign government publications and
requested legislation to facilitate the exchange of public documents
with foreign countries.
Although international conferences on exchanges at Paris and Brussels
in 1885 failed to bring agreement from key European governments,
an agent for the Smithsonian Institution in Europe was able to
secure large numbers of public documents for shipment to the Library
of Congress, specifically 7,000 volumes from the governments of
Hungary, Saxony, Wurttemberg, Bavaria, and Switzerland. By 1891,
the International Copyright Law was in effect, with Switzerland
as the first German-speaking country entitled to benefits of copyright
in the United States. This law was extended to Germany in the following
year.
In 1874, Librarian Spofford remarked that "there is almost no
work within the vast range of literature and science which may
not at sometime prove useful to the legislature of a great nation." With
this in mind, in 1882 the Library accepted, by a special act of
Congress, the private library of Joseph Meredith Toner. This collection,
numbering over 50,000 books, pamphlets, and periodicals, is primarily
housed in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Recognized
as having great historic, commercial, and political value, the
Toner Collection also contains a large number of German scientific
journals from the nineteenth century. Many important German-related
items were acquired in the following year from the Department of
State and the War Department, including a great variety of foreign
newspapers and journals covering most of the century.
The importance of collecting German-language materials was emphasized
in 1898 when Librarian of Congress John Russell Long noted, "the
Library would be justified in spending as much money on continental
literature as upon that of Great Britain... The large immigration
of Germans, their widening influence in the formation of American
character, their interest in German history, literature and genealogy--an
interest sure to remain with their descendants--would be the highest
reason for a very full German collection in our National Library." In
this prescient statement, Librarian Long justified and encouraged
the Library's vigorous acquisition of German-language works, an
acquisitions policy which continues today. Upon the death of Prince
Otto von Bismarck in 1898 the Library purchased all available material
relating to his career. A good representation of fifteenth- and
early sixteenth-century German and northern European woodcuts and
engravings was also added to the collections.
Early Twentieth-Century Acquisitions
In 1900, the Library acquired many important German works, including
some of the great national bibliographies, such as the forty-four-volume Allgemeine
deutsche Biographie. The Annual Report of the Librarian
of Congress for the year 1900 provides insight into the development
of the fledgling German collections. At that time, the Library's
holdings consisted of 268 volumes from Austria-Hungary and 1,397
from Germany, including early historical material and collections
from the states of Prussia, Saxony, Brandenburg, and Wurttemberg.
Some of the German-language newspapers on file represented the
cities of Vienna, Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich,
Strasbourg, Bern, Geneva, Lugano, and Zurich. By 1901, Librarian
Herbert Putnam could report that "the great deficiencies in continental
literature have been alleviated." In 1902, important manuscript
accessions contained materials relating to the Franco-Prussian
War. By 1904, the Library was receiving 262 German-language periodicals
and 11 German-language newspapers.
The German collections were further enhanced by two private collections.
The first was the Albrecht Weber Collection, which contained "the
foundation for all work in Indian philology" and comprised 3,018
books and 1,002 pamphlets. The second was the Kohl Collection of
manuscript maps depicting the progress of the discovery of America
which the German-born geographer and cartographer, Johann Georg
Kohl, made for the U.S. government in the mid-nineteenth century.
During the mid-1850s he undertook several seminal geographical
studies that focused on the discovery and exploration of the East,
West, and Gulf coasts of North America and the Gulf Stream. Well
into the twentieth century the Kohl Collection was considered the
most comprehensive compilation of cartographic reproductions in
America. In addition to the Kohl Collection, the Library acquired
Caspar Vopell's manuscript globe dating from 1543.
In 1905 Librarian Putnam inaugurated the Foreign Copying Program,
which began by transcribing manuscripts relating to American history
in the British Museum (now British Library) and later was extended
to other overseas libraries. The collection of manuscripts documenting
aspects of American history from the German-speaking countries
alone totaled 300,000 items. Putnam's observations on the need
for a "full" German collection were reflected in a 1906 Library
publication entitled A List of Works Relating to the Germans
in the United States. Important German acquisitions over the
next two years were the Calendar of Papers Relating to the
German Troops in the American Revolution and the papers of
Carl Schurz (1821-1906)--soldier, senator, Secretary of the Interior,
reformer, and editor--which numbered over 23,000 items. Subsequently,
over 1,500 pieces of private correspondence between Schurz and
his wife Margarethe, which the Schurz family had withheld, were
added to the manuscript collection.
The music collection grew throughout the early years of the twentieth
century with the addition of works by such prominent German composers
as Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Franz Liszt, and Richard Strauss.
In 1909, the Music Division purchased the Albert Schatz Collection,
originally located in Rostock, which comprised over 12,000 German
and Italian librettos from the seventeenth century and 4,000 from
the eighteenth century. This extraordinary collection constitutes
a chronology of opera performances from 1541 to 1901 and is accompanied
by a catalog prepared by Mr. Schatz himself. In the following year,
the division acquired the Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin and Marquise
Martorell collections, which contained works by Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart and nearly thirty full manuscript scores of operas by Joseph
Haydn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and others.
In 1910 the Library purchased the Deneke Collection, which includes
rare materials by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller,
and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. In the same year President William
Howard Taft signed a general copyright proclamation declaring reciprocal
copyright relations with Austria, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland.
One of the most notable events of 1911 for the Library's German
collections was the Law Library's publication of the Guide
to the Law and Legal Literature of Germany. The first
of its kind, this publication was as well received in Europe as
it was in the United States. The year 1912 brought additions to
the German collections in the form of gold medals sent to the Library
from the Emperor of Austria, the King of Prussia, and the Hanseatic
City of Bremen.
Acquisitions During the War Years
German acquisitions were hampered only slightly by World War I.
Librarian Putnam reported that receipts of foreign official publications
for 1915 were "but little less than those of the preceding year." The
Librarian's report for 1915 noted a twelve percent decrease in
German-language accessions; yet the Library was still able to obtain
such items as the untrimmed 1790 copy of Goethe's Faust and
eight full-page woodcuts attributed to Albrecht Dürer. The
personal library and manuscripts of jurist Paul Krüger were
purchased in 1920, prompting the systematic development of the
Library's collections of Roman Law materials. The foreign law collections
in German also continued to grow throughout the war years, leading
the Librarian to state that "now a representative collection of
the important legal literature of the world has been assembled
in the Library." Similarly, the map and music collections grew
despite the war, with only the Print Division (later Prints and
Photographs Division) reporting that "the war in Europe has possibly
interfered more with accessions of importance to the... collections
of the Division... than with other divisions of the Library." The
poster collections now contain approximately 4,000 German posters,
and the Graphic Design collection contains samples of American
and European commercial prints from the period 1875-1925.
At the end of the war the Library purchased several collections
of war-related materials and other items previously ordered but
not delivered, as well as a collection of several hundred German-language
broadsides issued in Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Poland,
and Italy. With these acquisitions, the Library's accessions reached
their prewar level. Other notable acquisitions included a collection
of 20,000 typewritten cards containing summaries and translations
of articles that had appeared in newspapers and periodicals published
in the states of the Central Powers during the war.
The Library's German collections continued to grow in the 1920s
and 1930s. Receipts of German government publications, which had
decreased during the war years, were renewed and greatly strengthened
following a series of official visits to Germany in the 1920s by
the noted bibliographer James B. Childs. The Library also acquired
a large number of items of German interest, both through purchase
and as gifts from Otto H.F. Vollbehr during this period. Most noteworthy
were 3,000 incunabula (many of German origin), which quadrupled
the Library's holdings of fifteenth-century books and provided
the Library with one of the three perfect copies of the Gutenberg
Bible printed on vellum. Also acquired from Vollbehr was the Wilhelm
Schreiber Collection, which contained over 20,000 book illustrations
from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and Schreiber's
own handwritten inventory, as well as 142 volumes of publications
relating to the Reformation, several attributed to Martin Luther
and John Calvin. The collection also included decretals, papal
bulls, and canon law commentaries.
In 1928, the papers of Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben were
purchased from the New York Historical Society as an adjunct to
the papers of George Washington. The Library purchased the Paul
Lowenberg Collection in 1938, which contained first editions of
nearly all the works of the "Waltz Kings" of Vienna, the Lanner
and Strauss families. The collection has over 1,600 published piano
scores complemented by four meticulously compiled volumes of background
information.
During World War II, as in World War I, the acquisition of German
publications was hampered but not halted. Axis publications, while
difficult to obtain, were provided primarily by neutral dealers
and through government channels. The Legislative Reference Service
(now Congressional Research Service) of the Library of Congress
established a Defense Section to assist Congress and defense agencies
and a Division of Special Information staffed by more than 100
experts on foreign countries. These bodies provided services unavailable
elsewhere, in or out of the government. The Alien Property Custodian
forwarded copies of 918 volumes and pamphlets reproduced from German
originals to aid the war effort. The amount of wartime material
made available for Congress was further expanded by the assistance
of the Allied Control Commission. This included material, as Librarian
Luther H. Evans stated, that "would never have been otherwise obtained,
or..., if acquired through normal channels, would have arrived
too late for most effective service."
Postwar Acquisitions
Immediately following World War II, the Library, recognizing the
urgent need to acquire German material published between 1933 and
1945, dispatched missions to the main German cities and made arrangements
to obtain wartime publications. This gave rise to the Cooperative
Acquisitions Project, in which the Library became the executive
arm of an effort to procure and supply U.S. libraries with important
works that had appeared in Europe during the immediate prewar period
and throughout the war years. Unfortunately, many of the publishing
houses in Germany lost their stock during the war, and those publishers
which had stock available frequently sold out before the Library
agents could place orders. Nevertheless, the Cooperative Acquisitions
Project did distribute over two million pieces, of which approximately
485,000 went to the Library of Congress.
By 1947, Librarian Evans reported that the Library had supervised
the completion of purchase orders in all four Allied occupation
zones for other U.S. libraries. The Library was also able to procure
one shipment of materials held on prewar orders for American libraries
by book dealers in Leipzig, even though Leipzig was in the Soviet-occupied
zone. In total, the Library acquired 615,027 wartime items from
Germany, 6,984 from Austria, and 2,462 from Switzerland. Among
the most notable items obtained in Europe after the war were an
early verse translation of the Middle High German epic, Das
Lied der Nibelungen by Johann Gustav Buschung (1815) and a
first edition of Goethe's Stella: ein Schauspiel für Liebende
in fünf Akten (1776). Among other German acquisitions
was a portion of the archives of the Deutsches Ausland-Institut,
which was staffed by Nazi officers and used to promote National
Socialism abroad; collections of prints and photographs of Nazi
origin acquired by the Library's mission in Europe; books belonging
to Adolf Hitler that are now in the Rare Book and Special Collections
Division; the Third Reich collection containing books, albums,
and printed material from the Reichskanzlei Library in Berlin;
the private book collections of several high-ranking Nazi Party
officials, including Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, and
Franz Xavier Schwarz; forty-seven personal photograph albums of
Hermann Göring covering 1933-1942; and twenty-five plans for
the redevelopment of Berlin by Albert Speer. The major groups of
documentary photographs consist of 500 lots of Nazi-period photographs
and 150 lots of Rehse Archiv für Zeitgeschichte und Publizistik encompassing the two World Wars. These lots are described in the Prints and
Photographs Division card catalog.
The Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division holds
the German Speech and Monitored Broadcast Collection, which contains
recordings of special events, public addresses by Nazi Party officials,
foreign radio broadcasts, news broadcasts and political speeches
from more than twenty European countries and governments in exile;
a film collection numbering approximately 1,200 features, over
1,000 newsreels, and more than 2,000 educational, cultural, and
propaganda shorts. The Science and Technology Division acquired
custody of a collection of important documents on German industry,
known as the FIAT and BIOS reports, that came to the Library through
Allied Intelligence shortly after World War II. These documents
provide a clear picture of the nature of German technological advancement
and demonstrate German industry's single-minded orientation toward
war.
With the establishment of a European Affairs Division in the Reference
Department in 1948, Europe was finally represented as a regional
division within the Library of Congress. The new division had acquisition,
reference, bibliographical, research, and liaison responsibilities.
Special Collections
When Lessing J. Rosenwald presented his magnificent collection
of illustrated books to the Library of Congress, between 1943 and
1979, it included his earliest book purchases, which were fifteenth-century
German illustrated books corresponding to his interest in early
woodcut prints.
Included
in the Rosenwald Collection are some very important early books
produced in Mainz: the Giant Bible of Mainz, a spectacular fifteenth-century
manuscript; the Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer printing of Durantis' Rationale
divinorum officiorum (1459); and the 1460 Catholicon,
believed to have been printed by Johann Gutenberg. The Rosenwald
Collection has some 560 incunabula, or fifteenth-century printed
books. These were added to the over 5,000 incunabula in the Rare
Book and Special Collections Division, giving the Library of Congress
the largest number of fifteenth-century books in the Western Hemisphere.
Of course, many of these were printed in Germany where western
printing began in 1454.
The Library is fortunate to have the cornerstone of printing history
in its copy of the Gutenberg Bible, printed in Mainz around 1454-55.
This complete copy on vellum was purchased from Otto Vollbehr in
1930 through a special Congressional appropriation.
The Rosenwald Collection also brought to the Library a fine collection
of modern German illustrated books. The Rare Book and Special Collections
Division has continued to build in this area. The holdings of the
books of the Cranach Press of Weimar are especially impressive,
including a copy of Hamlet and a collection of some of
the original woodblocks used for illustrating the edition.
The papers of Georg Wunderlich (1883-1951), donated by his wife,
were an important addition to the manuscript collections, as reported
in the May 1953 issue of the Library of Congress Quarterly
Journal of Current Acquisitions. The gift comprised 2,700
manuscript pieces and eight printed works. Wunderlich, a German
lawyer and jurist, lived through the imperial, Weimar, and Nazi
periods and through his work provided insight into this extremely
important phase of German history.
In 1955, the celebrated violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler
donated an extensive collection of music manuscripts to the Library,
many of which were his own compositions. The composer made further
additions to the collection by donating music manuscripts from
Max Bruch, as well as compositions of his own.
Recent Acquisitions
The most significant German-related gains of the Library during
the 1970s and the 1980s were the Johannes Brahms and Sigmund Freud
Collections. Purchase of the Brahms collection was assisted by
the Gertrude Clark Whittall Foundation. By the sesquicentennial
of Brahms' birth, the Library of Congress held more of his manuscripts
and other related items than any repository outside of Vienna.
The Whittall Foundation Collection also includes manuscript sketches
and scores of Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Alban
Berg, Joseph Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart, Max Reger, Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schubert, Richard
Wagner, and Carl Maria von Weber. The Sigmund Freud Collection,
numbering over 80,000 items, some of which have been microfilmed,
contains manuscripts of Freud's books and articles. The major portion
of the collection was donated or deposited by the Sigmund Freud
Archives, Inc., New York, and by Freud's daughter, Anna Freud.
Additional items have been received by gift and purchase from relatives,
acquaintances, and associates of Freud, and from dealers. In 1975,
the Rare Book and Special Collections Division began collecting
first editions of Freud's works in German and English and later
editions containing contextual revisions made by the author. Among
these works is a first edition of Die Traumdeutung (Leipzig
und Wien: F.Deuticke, 1900), a work which has come to epitomize
Freud's contribution to psychiatry. This collection now numbers
more than 200 titles. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division
also has books from Freud's private library, most of which bear
an inscription to Freud, his signature, or some other indication
of ownership.
In 1975, the Geography and Map Division acquired the Hauslab-
Liechtenstein Cartographic Collection. This collection, assembled
by Austro-Hungarian Field Marshall Franz Ritter von Hauslab during
the nineteenth century, includes approximately 9,000 map sheets,
representing about 6,000 titles from the 16th to the nineteenth
centuries. The collection contains much of von Hauslab's original
cartographic library, including many maps depicting Austria and
Germany. The Prints and Photographs Division has among its holdings
the Hauslab Album of 257 original broadsides of land and sea battles (1566-1711).
In
May 2003, the German collections were enriched by one of the most
important acquisitions in the two-century history of the Library:
the 1507 map of the world by Martin Waldseemüller. The first
document to bear the name "America," the map is often referred
to as America's birth certificate. It is also the first map to
depict a distinct Western Hemisphere and the Pacific Ocean as a
separate body of water. The acquisition of the Waldseemüller
Map, which is in extraordinarily pristine condition, culminated
a nearly century-long effort by the Library to obtain one of the
rarest and most important documents in the history of European
cartographic thought.
Special custodial divisions such as Rare Book and Special Collections,
Geography and Map, Music, and Prints and Photographs, have regularly
and enthusiastically acquired German-language works. However, the
Library annually adds thousands of German-language titles to the
general collections as well. The Library of Congress has the largest
collection of German-language titles of any country outside of
the German-speaking world. The Library's general collections are
especially strong in recent German scholarship (1980-present),
including German history, literature and literary criticism, politics
and government, intellectual life and the arts. Particularly impressive
is the Library's collection of works on the former German Democratic
Republic, a collection which numbers approximately 60,000 volumes.
Conclusion
As one may observe from this chronology, the Library of Congress
acquires material in a variety of ways--by purchase, exchange or
gift. The vast size of the Library's German collections precludes
frequent assessments of their strengths and weaknesses, but systematic
collecting and retrospective acquisitions help maintain the collections'
integrity.
In 2006, the German collections in the Library comprised approximately
3.3 million volumes, with an average annual increment of about
30,000 volumes. Although a complete survey has never been made,
comments from scholarly patrons indicate that the Library's collections
of German history and literature are among the most extensive in
the United States. It should also be noted that the German-language
items in the Library's special collections exceed those found in
the general collections, numbering an additional four million pieces.
Readers can use the Library's online catalog as
well as the card catalog and other printed sources, to find specific
works in the collections. Reference questions may be directed to
the "Contact Us" link below.
Additional German Resources at the Library of Congress:
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