Dresden: : Treasures from the Saxon State Library

Citation

Kelly, W.A. (1998), "Dresden: : Treasures from the Saxon State Library", Library Review, Vol. 47 No. 4, pp. 240-241. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1998.47.4.240.4

In recent years the Library of Congress has mounted exhibitions of the treasures of two of the world’s leading libraries, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and the Bibliothèque Nationale. In the spring of 1996 a worthy third was added, the Sachsische Landesbibliothek (Saxon State Library) in Dresden. The volume under review, which was designed to accompany the exhibition, contains essays by key members of the curatorial staff in Dresden along with illustrations of a selection of the objects featured in the exhibition and a checklist of these. At the risk of appearing to play down the essays contributed by the other curators, this reviewer, as a lover of German music of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, found the essay by Dr Landmann on the history of music in Saxony especially interesting.

The Saxon State Library, which has now celebrated the 440th anniversary of its foundation, began, as did many other of the state libraries in present‐day Germany, as a private court collection. The founder, the Elector August (reigned 1553‐1586), personally superintended the acquisitions policy of the library. Most of the books and manuscripts were purchased, which means that the library did not benefit from the flood of books released by the dissolution of the monasteries in Saxony. It was in fact the University of Leipzig which profited in the main from that bibliographical windfall. The heyday of the Dresden Court Library was the eighteenth century, thanks to the economic prosperity of Saxony, which enabled large private collections to be acquired for the library. Three of these collections, the Besser, Bünau and Brühl, together brought in about 122,000 volumes. Through a deliberate policy of transferring rare volumes from smaller institutions, the library had become the state depository in all but name by the end of that century. Although it had lost ground by the 1830s to the larger collections in Berlin and Munich, it continued to exert a powerful influence on German librarianship through a series of energetic directors, although this role is hardly mentioned in Olson’s recent monograph on the problems surrounding the establishment of a national library in Germany. The dark period in the library’s history, as with the rest of Germany, began with the accession to power by Hitler. As well as losing large numbers of books in the wilful destruction of Dresden by British and American bombers early in 1945, the library lost just as many to the confiscations by the Soviet occupying forces. All totalitarian governments, whether of the left or of the right, are equally dangerous to libraries, as certain towns in France now know to their cost. That the Saxon State Library managed not only to survive the intellectual and material grimness of the GDR years but even to uphold the high professional standards set by its earlier directors was due largely to Burghard Burgemeister, who achieved the double feat of protecting the collections from mindless bureaucratic interference and of expanding them.

It is customary for the curator responsible for a large exhibition to remain in the background, in order to allow the exhibits to be seen to better effect. In this case, however, it would be churlish to follow this custom, for the success of the exhibition owed as much to the curator of the Library of Congress’s German and Dutch collections, the ebullient and talented Margrit Krewson, as to anybody else. For as well as organising the exhibition, which included the obligatory, time‐consuming task of writing the texts of the explanatory labels to accompany the exhibits, she also had the enormous labour of raising the funds which are now so necessary to stage such an event. Heroines have a greater toughness than people often imagine, and Krewson needed a large amount of intellectual and moral courage to withstand a barrage of criticism from small‐minded members of the Polish community, and, it is strongly rumoured in Germanist circles, even from some of her own colleagues, who took exception to her perfectly reasonable remarks on the later dynastic links between the ruling house of Saxony and Poland.

The high standard of proof reading evident in the volume is no more than one would expect of Krewson’s abilities. I wish, however, that her Herculean efforts to make the exhibition the enormous success it was had been served better by those responsible for the typesetting of this accompanying volume. The unjustified lines detract from the overall appearance, as do the numerous incorrect word divisions.