WEIMAR LIBRARY
First time round, the books escaped: the Duchess had moved them out to her new
library in the Green Palace eight years before the great fire of 1774. The
ruin of the Old Residence was one of the first things Goethe saw when he
arrived in Weimar in the following year. Later, for thirty-five years from
1797, he ran Anna Amalia’s library, as he ran much else in the duchy. With
its building adapted and extended by himself and the local architect Clemens
Wenceslaus Coudray, and its collections enlarged, the library became an
intellectual arsenal (it had most recently been a literal one) for the
creators of a modern German literary culture who were gathered in that small
town. When Schiller spends nine hours a day reading up the sources for his
historical narratives, or when Herder says he has read everything on a
subject, we know where the books came from. (Goethe had to remind Herder, to
his annoyance, of the 500 volumes he had kept out for up to ten years.
Goethe borrowed 2,000, but returned them more promptly.) On September 2,
2004, fire at last caught up with the books and manuscripts. A few more
weeks and they would have been transferred to a magnificent new extension,
indeed more of an independent library, in the massive Cube elegantly slotted
into the courtyard of another historic building across the way. The
electrical fault responsible was part of an overall decrepitude long since
reported and publicized (“The cradle of German culture will become the grave
of a million books if you don’t help”).
But with much of the material about to move, renovation seemed to the
authorities less than urgent. Now over 100,000 largely historic volumes,
thirty-seven paintings and almost the whole collection of musical
manuscripts were lost or severely damaged. The building itself seemed
irretrievably ruined. The top storey was burned out, the exquisite rococo
chamber filled with rubbish from above. Water and chemical foam had seeped
everywhere into the structure, both woodwork and stone. Photographs convey
the hopelessness of the morning after.
Yet from that first day there was a resolve to rebuild and restore, an
extension of the spirit which had brought so many people out in the night to
rescue books at risk to life. The same spirit became a local and then a
national impulse that brought in funds for restoration, some 20,000
contributions, from a large grant by the Vodafone Foundation and a surprise
contribution from a distant brewery, down to the year’s overtime payments of
the dustmen and bus drivers of Sondershausen. On October 24, barely three
years after the disaster and on the 200th anniversary of Anna Amalia’s
death, the library was reopened by the Federal President.
Perhaps there was magic in a woman’s name. Institutional titles the library
once had, or ones proposed after reunification (“Central Library of German
Classicism”, “Weimar Research Library”) would surely have had less effect.
The slogan “Help for Anna Amalia” invited a personal identification. One’s
appreciation of this spontaneous response should not be mistaken for
sentimentality.
Perhaps there was an element of conscience in the 4 million euros of Federal
funding that instantly came in. The library had been too long neglected,
though renovation was scheduled and an architect appointed. Conscience has
certainly caught up now. The Foundation that runs Weimar’s libraries and
historic buildings has a 20 per cent budget increase. The Goethe–Schiller
Archive has a grant of 220,000 euros to preserve the manuscripts of the two
poets’ correspondence, threatened by the acid ink – not the highest of
scholarly priorities, but an apt symbolic gesture.
All this only touches the elevated values Weimar itself symbolizes. The
President’s address drove home the ultimate point. Restoring one historic
library left the nation’s public and school libraries thinly scattered and
under-resourced, its university libraries pathetically short of “coverage”.
Yet libraries were symbols of the word-dependence of an advanced society, of
the need to read and interpret the world, not just for an “information
economy” but for a culture. A society’s values are easily invoked, less
readily paid for. For a moment on a cold Wednesday in Weimar, libraries were
pushed up high on the political agenda. Whether the impetus will outlive the
celebrations remains to be seen.
Meanwhile there is lasting and absorbing documentation in three volumes
published this year. In Die Bibliothek brennt: Ein Bericht aus Weimar
(Göttingen: Wallstein) the librarian, Michael Knoche, narrates events down
to the opening of the library and study centre in the Cube in February 2005;
in “Es nimmt der Augenblick, was Jahre geben”: Vom Wiederaufbau der
Büchersammlung der Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, edited by Claudia
Kleinbub, Katja Lorenz and Johannes Mangei (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht), specialists discuss the nature and extent of the losses, the
technicalities of book restoration and the reacquisition of early editions
(it’s amazing what has already turned up); and in the central piece of Die
Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek: Nach dem Brand in neuem Glanz, edited by
Walther Grunwald, Michael Knoche and Hellmut Seemann (Berlin: Otto
Meissners), the beautifully illustrated volume that marks the reopening, the
architect details the technical debates and solutions that brought Anna
Amalia back to life.
Even in the light of that achievement, the disaster remains a harrowing story:
from the first message, “The library’s on fire”, which provides the
librarian’s title, via the dramatic moment when the flames break through the
roof, but the rescue operations are luckily made possible by the strong
design of the roofbeams. Over all this a massive bust of Goethe, too heavy
to be shifted without mechanical help, continues to preside as he presided
over the library in life. Then the sad aftermath: sorting through the
rubbish for anything that looked like a book and sending off forty tons of
material to restorers in Leipzig, whose skills were honed by the Dresden
floods of 2002. Then come endless press conferences and television
interviews, of varying sensitivity and usefulness. Also all sorts of
decisions. How to phrase an appeal for a cultural cause at the same time as
the Asian tsunami. Whether to sell off unrestorable fragments to help raise
money. Wisely they didn’t: in Germany burned books are a subject needing
tact.
Things weren’t all sweetness and light. A present descendant of Anna Amalia
tried to pull rank in a post-feudal age, demanding the resignation of
whoever placed those valuable things up there under the roof (answer: it was
his ancestor’s librarian 240 years ago); a multinational company required
the librarian’s presence at an inflated PR occasion so as to be seen handing
over a rather modest cheque; a suggestion that members of the nation’s
literary academy might consider donating a copy of their books to the
library got minimal response. But the overall sense is of an engaged and
active community. “So much destroyed, but also such unbelievable energies
released”, in Michael Knoche’s summing-up.
Among the half-charred single pages found blowing about the streets was a
reproduction of Blake’s God in the act of creation, bending down from a gap
in the clouds very like the opening atop the rococo room itself, his hair
streaming in the winds of space, in his hands the compasses of precise
construction. Altogether a nice emblem for the architectural reconstruction
and its result. The beauty of shape and surface in the restored rococo room
is underpinned by the most up-to-date technnology. There is now something
like eight times as much floor space as before holding the machinery that
guarantees the library’s climatic conditions and security.
So the volume’s celebratory subtitle, “after the fire in new splendour”, is
not quite accurate. Rather it is the old splendour with a new invisible
support system. Getting there was complex, and it is a wonder it has all
been done so fast. There were fierce debates between the architect and the
historical preservation authorities over what was desirable and what was
permissible. Sometimes they were resolved by discoveries as more and more of
the building’s archaeology was laid bare – the work whose first cause was a
fire in the roof finally went down to foundation level. Decisions on the
external and internal colour schemes were not arbitrarily aesthetic: “You
have to understand a building’s history before you can restore it”, notes
the architect. His account taxes the reader’s vocabulary and spatial
imagination, but ends as a compelling comprehensive picture. Photographs
show every phase and aspect of the restoration.
Anna Amalia is once more, for 200 visitors a day, a sight for sore eyes: a
delicate chamber piece compared with the symphonic grandeur of Panizzi’s
British Museum Reading Room, Trinity College Dublin, or Trinity College,
Cambridge. It is also once more a working library, a centre for the study of
the book and a centre to the libraries of Weimar, which themselves stand at
the crossroads between the Baroque remit of the Duke August library at
Wolfenbüttel (in Anna Amalia’s childhood home duchy) and the modern remit of
the Literature Archive in Schiller’s Marbach. Weimar is not just a museum
and a curiosity for tourists. With its new and its restored old library it
reassumes its place as one of the great homes of literature and literary
scholarship.
T. J. Reed has recently retired as Professor of German at Oxford. He is
one of the General Editors of the new Frankfurt edition of the complete
works of Thomas Mann. His edition of the early short fiction, Erzählungen
1893–1912, has recently appeared.
