Anthony Grafton: Inside Hitler's Library ... What The Books He Read Say About The Man He Was
Few buildings on Capitol Hill are grander than the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, with its great stairway, pillared façade, and magnificent domed reading room. And few rooms in that building seem more ordinary, even banal, than the rare book storage area where 1,200 books from the collection of Adolf Hitler stand tightly packed on steel shelves. Along with another eighty items in the Brown University Library and scattered texts elsewhere, these are the modest remains of the more than sixteen thousand books that Hitler assembled in his residence in Munich, in the Reichskanzlei in Berlin, and in his villa on the Obersalzberg in Bavaria, near Berchtesgaden. Like the Thousand-Year Empire, Hitler's imposing collections proved considerably more fragile than he expected. Even before the Führer died, American and Russian soldiers were packing his library and taking it home, bit by bit. Some came as single spies, like the young lieutenant who brought a much-thumbed copy of Henry Ford's My Life and Work back from Munich to New York, where he sold it at Scribner's. Others came in battalions, especially the Soviet "trophy brigade" that took the entire ten-thousand-volume collection from Berlin to Moscow, where it has not been seen since the early 1990s.
Only one large segment of the collection--three thousand books hidden in beer crates in a Bavarian salt mine--remained intact after the war ended. Members of the U.S. Army's Twenty-First Counterintelligence Corps concluded, after what they called a "hasty inspection of the scattered books," that the collection "was noticeably lacking in literature and almost totally devoid of drama and poetry." Worse still, "none of the books examined gave the appearance of extensive use. They had no marginal notes or underlinings." Hans Beilhack, reporting on the collection in November 1946 for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, noted contemptuously that the "library itself, seen as a whole, is only interesting because it is the library of a 'great' statesman and yet so uninteresting. It is the typical library of a dilettante."
Once the books reached Washington, Arnold Jacobius, then an intern and later an expert on the Weimar journalist Kurt Tucholsky, made a more detailed report to Frederick Goff, the head of rare books at the Library of Congress. Even he detected "little in the way of marginal notes, autographs or other similar features of interest," and at his suggestion most of the books, the ones that bore no signs of direct use, were merged into the library's general collection or sold as duplicates. Safely stored in Washington, even the books that the library kept and set apart attracted little attention. Many years ago, a librarian pointed them out to me as we hurried from one collection of incunabula to another: so far as he knew, no one had yet studied them. (In fact, some scholars had--notably Gerhard Weinberg and Robert Waite; but more than half of them remained uncatalogued as late as 2001.)
In the last twenty years or so, scholars in many fields of the humanities have realized that books, when studied as material objects as well as texts, can tell many stories about their owners. Like travelers in the woods, those who buy and read books leave tracks for scholars to read. Substantive (and legible) marginal notes and scrawled underlinings in pencil, fine bindings and tattered paper wrappers--all have something to tell us about those who saw them as appropriate ways of personalizing and responding to a particular book. Historians of the book--many of whom do their research at the Library of Congress and the Folger Library around the corner--have traced the development of such devices as the "manicule," the little pointing hand which, when drawn in a margin, indicated that a reader found a passage important, and which, as William H. Sherman has shown in his absorbing Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, was one of many readers' practices that survived the transition from script to print....
Read entire article at New Republic
Only one large segment of the collection--three thousand books hidden in beer crates in a Bavarian salt mine--remained intact after the war ended. Members of the U.S. Army's Twenty-First Counterintelligence Corps concluded, after what they called a "hasty inspection of the scattered books," that the collection "was noticeably lacking in literature and almost totally devoid of drama and poetry." Worse still, "none of the books examined gave the appearance of extensive use. They had no marginal notes or underlinings." Hans Beilhack, reporting on the collection in November 1946 for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, noted contemptuously that the "library itself, seen as a whole, is only interesting because it is the library of a 'great' statesman and yet so uninteresting. It is the typical library of a dilettante."
Once the books reached Washington, Arnold Jacobius, then an intern and later an expert on the Weimar journalist Kurt Tucholsky, made a more detailed report to Frederick Goff, the head of rare books at the Library of Congress. Even he detected "little in the way of marginal notes, autographs or other similar features of interest," and at his suggestion most of the books, the ones that bore no signs of direct use, were merged into the library's general collection or sold as duplicates. Safely stored in Washington, even the books that the library kept and set apart attracted little attention. Many years ago, a librarian pointed them out to me as we hurried from one collection of incunabula to another: so far as he knew, no one had yet studied them. (In fact, some scholars had--notably Gerhard Weinberg and Robert Waite; but more than half of them remained uncatalogued as late as 2001.)
In the last twenty years or so, scholars in many fields of the humanities have realized that books, when studied as material objects as well as texts, can tell many stories about their owners. Like travelers in the woods, those who buy and read books leave tracks for scholars to read. Substantive (and legible) marginal notes and scrawled underlinings in pencil, fine bindings and tattered paper wrappers--all have something to tell us about those who saw them as appropriate ways of personalizing and responding to a particular book. Historians of the book--many of whom do their research at the Library of Congress and the Folger Library around the corner--have traced the development of such devices as the "manicule," the little pointing hand which, when drawn in a margin, indicated that a reader found a passage important, and which, as William H. Sherman has shown in his absorbing Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, was one of many readers' practices that survived the transition from script to print....