Looted libraries

The afterlife of Germany’s lost book collections points to the complexity and the promise of a common European culture.

The Bible isn’t listed in the catalogue. If it were, its bibliographic description would probably read: « Illegible date, post-1650, large folio format, wooden binding, metal clasps, German Gothic, printed in two columns, Luneburg. » The book has a bullet hole in its spine. Was it caught in the heat of hand-to-hand combat? Did it save a life?

This bullet-pierced German Bible is housed in the University Library of Łódź (BUŁ), a city in Poland 120 kilometers southwest of Warsaw. It is kept in a room that the University librarians informally refer to as « the Hidden Treasures Room » — a special collection dedicated to prints published before 1800. The room, dark, airless, is filled with shelves arranged in narrow aisles and overlooked by a gallery only accessible by ladders. It’s not a place one stumbles upon by chance. In this ancient book room, the oval labels affixed to the spines are mismatched, reflecting a patchwork of different classification systems. Many books still bear the former marks of the institution from which they originally came, with the stamps’ designs remarkably diverse and eclectic. 78% of the books in the University of Łódź’ Special Collections Room came from German collections, both private and public. Before the war, some of these books were located in Silesia or Pomerania, provinces that had been Prussian for centuries and then in August 1945 were transferred to Poland. Others were moved from Berlin, from the former Preußischen Staatsbibliothek as well as the Stadtbibliothek. Covered in a thin layer of dust, the volumes often have trimmed corners and pages marked by humidity stains or pierced by bookworms.

I first discovered this room when I was researching the vanished Bibliothek Schloss Plathe, a library that was founded in the eighteenth century and housed in a castle in East Pomerania, situated in the small city of Plathe, between Stettin and Danzig (now Płoty, Szczecin and Gdańsk). It belonged to my German family-in-law before the war. Little remained of this former library: a few manuscripts, scattered books, but above all, the last catalog of the collection. It allows us to reconstruct the collection and its holdings. After March 1945, when the Red Army moved into Pomerania, the library’s 16.000 books disappeared–looted, carted back to the USSR, possibly destroyed. Some of the collection, it turned out, had survived and ended up in the University Library in Łódź. In 2018 — seventy-three years after their original dispersal — I found myself in the « Hidden Treasures » room, identifying volumes that had been pillaged — or rescued — from this eighteenth century German family library after the Soviet takeover. The books I was seeking from this lost library were not alone in their war-orphaned state. The room was like a time capsule. All its volumes were veterans of twentieth-century turmoil — like the bullet-scarred Bible, they stood upright in their shelves, surrounded by unfamiliar neighbors, torn from the coherence of their former collections.