Press release: 22.11.2018

The German Museum of Books and Writing at the German National Library presents two projects commemorating the destruction of Leipzig’s book dealers’ quarter 75 years ago

4 December will be the 75th anniversary of the destruction of Leipzig’s Graphic Quarter. That night, a rain of explosive bombs and incendiaries laid waste the centre of Germany’s book industry in just under two hours (air raid siren: 3:39 am, all-clear: 5:32 am). More than 1,800 people died that night; 114,000 of Leipzig's citizens became homeless and 15,000 buildings were hit. The biggest publishing firms – including F.A. Brockhaus Verlag, Verlag Philipp Reclam jun. and Breitkopf & Härtel, the world’s oldest music publisher – were burnt out together with an estimated 50 million books. The German Museum of Books and Writing, the world’s oldest book museum, was a ruin, the headquarters of the German Book Traders’ Association destroyed, the Deutsche Bücherei badly damaged: the Allied offensive dealt the final blow to Leipzig’s centuries-old reputation as the “City of Books”, a reputation which had already been shaken to its foundations during World War I.

In his diary for 4 December 1943, Arthur Luther, literary scholar, head of department at the Deutsche Bücherei and survivor of the bombing raid, wrote: “The drone of planes... The ceiling collapses with a terrible crash, I fall on my back... glasses gone, hat gone... The crashes and shooting finally stop. We venture outside. First impression – flames everywhere, people screaming. I go into the library. The east wing is badly damaged. All windows shattered. Smoke is rising from the basement. The window frames in the east wing looking out onto Deutscher Platz are burnt out. The great reading room is full of broken fragments, debris and rubble. The wall painting by L. Hofmann has vanished. The whole building is icy cold, as not one window has been left intact. The post office, museum, university, opera house are on fire or have been reduced to rubble. The Brühl destroyed, the Old Theatre a ruin... Worst of all, however, the whole book traders’ quarter has been razed to the ground: all the big publishers, all the big printers, the book dealers’ house, the book museum etc.”

This “book museum”, now the German National Library’s German Museum of Books and Writing, was housed in the prestigious Buchhändlerhaus (book dealers’ house), in which the museum had ideologically exploited and celebrated the 400th birthday of “German hero” Johannes Gutenberg three years previously. During the night of 4 December, the museum lost nine-tenths of its collection. Just before the bombing, the most valuable artefacts had been relocated to the Erz mountains, where they survived the war. During the months immediately following the war, they were then taken by the Soviet Army to Moscow, where they are still kept today.

The German Museum of Books and Writing is using the 75th anniversary of the bombing of the Graphic Quarter as an opportunity to commemorate the destruction with two projects.

For one of these, the museum has placed one of the few objects that could be retrieved – bearing traces of powder – from the ruins of the Buchhändlerhaus early in December 1943 at the centre of an installation: a granite slab weighing several hundred kilograms that bears Chinese characters dating back around 3,000 years. At the beginning of December this year, the so-called stone drum, with chips and burn marks that still bear witness to the destruction, will be the focus of “GNDCon” in Frankfurt am Main – a congress that focuses on the principle of open, cooperatively developed and linked authority data as points of reference in the internet and aims to promote cooperation with online communities, museums, archives, publishing companies and universities – a future perspective for the cooperative cataloguing also of museum-based cultural heritage. In this context, the stone drum is an outstanding example of an eminently rich, interdisciplinary world of knowledge bundled into the burning glass of a single object. From the beginning of 2019, the exhibit will be back in the permanent exhibition of the German Museum of Books and Writing in Leipzig – enhanced and displayed in a cloud of interdisciplinary metadata that explains and contextualises this complex object.

The second project focuses on Leipzig's history as the “book capital” at the beginning of the 20th century. For this, 2,200 company locations in the Graphic Quarter have been extracted from a Leipzig address book dating from 1913 and entered into a database. This data has been prepared for display on a digital map in cooperation with the Department of Digital Cartography at the City of Leipzig’s Office of Geoinformation and Land Management. The map will be published at www.leipzig.de on the anniversary of the destruction of the book dealers’ quarter. At the beginning of December, it will also be presented on the 2nd Digital Humanities Day organised by the Forum for Digital Humanities and Academy of Sciences in Leipzig.

Traces of the war can still be seen in Leipzig’s former book dealers’ quarter today: large areas of wasteland and the derelict ruins of houses bear witness to the havoc wrought during World War II. Most of all, however, present-day visitors will see numerous new building projects, some incorporating the remains of historic buildings – as with the reconstruction of the former book trade house (Buchgewerbehaus).

Background

The book has shaped our culture and civilisation like no other medium. For centuries our knowledge about the world and its peoples has been stored in books. The task of the German Book and Writing Museum of the German National Library is to collect, exhibit and process evidence of book and media history. Founded in 1884 in Leipzig as the Deutsches Buchgewerbemuseum (German Book Trade Museum), it is the oldest museum in the world in the field of book culture, and also one of the most important with regard to the scope and quality of its holdings. The museum interlinks its holdings through national and international cooperative projects and feeds them into the widest possible range of academic disciplines.

Contact person
Dr. Stephanie Jacobs