15 June 2023 press release

Created by the German Museum of Books and Writing, the new virtual exhibition "Knowledge creates democracy. The Library of St. Pauls Church" marks the 175th anniversary of the German National Assembly at the Paulskirche (St. Paul's Church) in Frankfurt by taking a close look at the first German Parliament and its failure. To mark the anniversary of the first Democratic Congress from 14 to 17 June 1848, the exhibition, created in cooperation with the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library), focuses on the National Assembly's library, which is now part of the German National Library's collection and is housed in Leipzig.

The parliamentary library was a reference collection that was intended to support the parliamentarians in their work to establish democracy in Germany. The idea propounded by the revolutionaries of 1848 of turning the “Reichsbibliothek“into the nucleus of a national library was doomed to failure. When police confiscated the National Assembly's estate in December 1851, they also seized the 4,600 volumes that the numerous parliamentary committees at the Paulskirche had selected from publishers' catalogues by circulation procedure.

The collection was subsequently forgotten. It was not until 1912, when the Deutsche Bücherei was established in Leipzig, that its founding fathers recalled the Reichsbibliothek and legitimised its concept of a national book collection by reffering to the parliamentary library of 1848/49. In 1938, when the National Socialist Ministry of Propaganda finally transferred the Reichsbibliothek to the Deutsche Bücherei to mark its 25th anniversary since its foundation, it became clear how the book collection could also be instrumentalised for ideological purposes. For the German National Library, however, the idea of building a parliamentary reference library in accordance with the principle that participation and democracy are only possible when based on knowledge is as relevant today as it has ever been: knowledge creates democracy.

Knowledge creates democracy. The Library of St. Pauls Church, Frankfurt

Virtual exhibition on the platform of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek
https://ausstellungen.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/paulskirchenbibliothek

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 National Library’s German Museum of Books and Writing 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 also pays close attention to issues relating to the future of media in our networked societies.

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