Bibliotheken von Frauen: Ein Lexikon

Abstract

The value of personal book collections for an understanding of the lives and often the most intimate thoughts of their collectors should be uncontested—though the relationship is highly nuanced. Renaissance essayist Montaigne, early twentieth-century philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, and writers Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, and Alberto Manguel have all written about their personal libraries at length and with great affection, contrasting the books they only consult in libraries or borrow from friends with those they actually own. “Ownership,” wrote Benjamin in 1931, referring to his books, “is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”1 The Argentine-born Manguel, in his 2018 book Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions (Yale, 2018), dwells especially eloquently on the symbiotic relationship between his own inner life and the 35,000-volume library at his home in rural France, even as he was dismantling it to move it—alas, only parts of it—abroad.But what of the personal libraries of women through time? It is well known that during the literacy boom of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and even more so during the nineteenth, women were the principal consumers of belletristic literature. Did they also collect it—or only borrow it from the nascent public libraries of the era? And what about the distribution of book collecting across the social classes? Aristocratic collections, such as the one still residing in Corvey Abbey in Germany, with more than seventy thousand volumes, predominantly belles lettres, the joint creation of bibliophiles Landgrave Victor Amadeus (1779–1834) and his wife Elise, were often the pet projects not of their lordships but of women. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women were becoming doctors, scientists, and philosophers who also assembled libraries. But where are these libraries noted, recorded, and described? And where are they today?For Germany at least, this deficit is being addressed by several research groups—and now also by the present volume, whose title in English is “The Libraries of Women: A Lexicon.” Its compiler is Dagmar Jank, professor of library science at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, outside Berlin. It presents the available—often only scant surviving—information on the private collections of 770 important women of German history since around 1500. Interestingly, data was sought but not found for 500 other important women, who therefore remain unmentioned here, even if they did have libraries. It would have been interesting to see the list of those omitted names.Each entry is structured identically, though often only three or four of the seven fields have content: (1) header information (name, birth and death dates); (2) very brief biographical data, usually only profession (e.g., abbess, art dealer, journalist, politician—with all professions indexed at the end) and name before marriage; (3) size of book collection, if known; (4) general characterization of the library; (5) where cataloged or described in greater detail; (6) brief history of the collection, including location today; (7) articles or books about the library.Given the broad historical scope of this survey, it should be no surprise that aristocratic women dominate the census until the mid-nineteenth century. Are you curious about the personal collections of Christiane Fürstin zu Waldeck-Pyrmont (1725–1816) or Sophie Freifrau von Waitz von Eschen (1761–1816)? Then you will be delighted to find entries for them in this book. We discover that the former had a library of approximately ten thousand volumes on topics typical for the interests of the age: pietism, art, music, medicine, natural history, and philosophy, among others. We also learn that upon Christiane’s death, about half of the library was sold at auction. Cataloging (Bestandserschließung) was done in 1819—presumably preliminary to the sale of her books—and the lexicon also makes reference to a host of discussions of this collection in the literature, including treatments as recent as 2018. In fact, the bibliography of works consulted, extending over sixty pages, is one of the most valuable features of this volume.Of greater interest than the collections of aristocrats (at least to this reviewer) are the descriptions of libraries of more recent times, almost inevitably the collections of professional women, writers, philosophers, and scientists. And of these, of course, the most poignant are of the many libraries that were confiscated or destroyed in the 1930s and 1940s by the Nazis. Among the numerous collectors whose libraries suffered this fate were Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937), friend and muse of Freud, Rilke, and Nietzsche; and the women’s rights advocates Anita Augspurg (1857–1943) and Lida Gustava Heymann (1868–1943). We learn that the library of renowned painter, graphic artist, and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) was destroyed during an air attack along with her Berlin apartment in 1943. Other significant women’s libraries, among them that of Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), became significant only after their owners had fled the Nazis: Arendt’s collection, for example, is today at Stevenson Library, Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Her marginalia and annotations are of especial importance to biographers and other researchers, as is no less the case for many (most?) other surviving personal libraries.Between early modern times and the late twentieth century, we can learn from these pages details of many significant women’s collections that arose, flourished, and then often—but not always—disappeared. One that survived was the six-thousand-volume library of the Romantic author, artist, composer, and political activist Bettina von Arnim (1785–1859), which was merged into the GDR Academy of the Arts in 1951 before ultimately being incorporated into the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, where it presumably was not destroyed in the horrific fire there of 2004. At the other end of the spectrum, only a single book from the library of Elisabeth von Thadden (1890–1944), an important member of the anti-Nazi resistance, survives on the shelves of the State Library in Stuttgart. That fact is recorded here.My only substantive criticism of this volume is that it has been published as a printed book rather than, or in addition to, an updatable online database. Other major surveys of German libraries, among them foremost the Handbuch der historischen Buchbestände (45 volumes), edited by Bernhard Fabian, have long since been digitized and converted to queriable resources. The lack of a readily consultable database version of this book is regrettable.2 Modern historians, notwithstanding the continuing need to spend hours (years!) in libraries and archives, still make many discoveries, both targeted and serendipitous, by fashioning searches on the internet in proprietary databases such as ABC-CLIO, online catalogs, and even, yes, in the Wild West of the open web. Only cognoscenti will ever stumble upon this volume in the reference collections of major libraries, and certainly not unless aided by solid cataloging and expert library staff.This book is recommended for larger academic collections with strengths in German studies and women’s history. It is, of course, wholly in German, which may decrease the number of library users who will consult it.