THE ‘LIPPISCHE LANDESBIBLIOTHEK 169

Republic. Between 1904 when, as a sixteen-year-old, he resolved to devote himself to the collection of Grabbiana, and his death in 1975 Bergmann located and purchased the masses of material which were to provide the foundations for his own researches into Grabbe (124 publications). Bergmann’s life study of the author left many milestones, culminating in his work on the reliability of the biographical sources ( Die Glaubwurdigkeit der Zeugnisse fur den Lebensgang und Charakter Ch. D. Grabbes, Berlin 1933), his six-volume compilation of otherwise inaccessible contemporary reviews of Grabbe’s works (Grabbes Werke in der teitgenossischen Kritik, Detmold 1958-66), the standard historical-critical edition of the works and letters, also six volumes (‘Gottinger Akademie Ausgabe’, Emsdetten 1960-73), and the comprehensive Grabbe-Bibliographie (Amsterdam 1973). The history of this collection, which Bergmann reconstructs in his autobiographical Meine Grabbe-Sammlung. Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse (Detmold 1942), is a fascinating testimony to a bibliophile utterly devoted to the cause of his chosen author. Blessed with considerable private means, Bergmann was able, at a time when there was little competition for Grabbiana on the antiquarian market, to establish the huge collection which passed into the ownership of the ‘Lippische Landesbibliothek’ in 1938, where it was supervised by Bergmann himself until his retirement in 1952. For the Grabbe specialist this archive is unrivalled and indispensable: 55 1 manuscripts (including those of several complete works), 246 letters, a complete collection of Grabbe editions in all languages, the secondary literature in its virtual entirety, including unpublished dissertations and a multitude of more general works which mention Grabbe in passing, some 7,000 newspaper review articles which document Grabbe’s reception in minute detail, material on the stage history of the plays in relation to the development of German theatre, theatre programmes, commemorative publications and a comprehensive ‘corpus photographicum’ provide a resource base of exceptional scope and completeness. Single-handed, Bergmann was able to establish a library which could meet all the demands of serious scholarship. With its 12,500 volumes, the ‘Grabbe-Archiv Alfred Bergmann’ is the centre of Grabbe research today.

This archive is, however, by no means restricted to specialist literature on Grabbe. Its value as a centre for ‘Biedermeier’ studies on a wider scale rests above all on the section of the archive entitled ‘Der literarische Hintergrund’, which places Grabbe in a literary-historical context. The impetus behind Bergmann’s aim of providing a backdrop to Grabbe’s own life and works was provided by his period as librarian at the ‘Sammlung Kippenberg‘ in Leipzig, with its vast stocks of material related to Goethe. Following Anton Kippenberg‘s example, Bergmann began to assemble the works of the many contemporary authors read or referred to by Grabbe; of those ridiculed in his satirical comedy Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiGfere Bedeutung; of those with whom he was in personal contact in Leipzig, Berlin, Dresden and Dusseldorf; of those whose plays he reviewed in Detmold or for the Dihseldorjir Fremdenblatt; of those who treated the same themes (historical and legendary) as Grabbe. Finally Bergmann tracked down and added to his collection original and complete editions of as many German authors from the period 1750-1850 as could be obtained.

170 THE ‘LIPPISCHE LANDESBIBLIOTHEK

The result of such efforts is a unique mirror of German literary taste and production in the first decades of the nineteenth century, a collection containing 737 editions by 321 authors, comprising a total of some 4,800 volumes. With its wide-ranging stocks this part of the archive is a monument to the enormous discrepancy between the literary taste of the ‘Biedermeier‘ public and the canon of authors and works which has survived today, and offers splendid facilities for research into the shallow ‘Tagesliteratur’ which, now virtually unknown, dominated the journals and salons of the age. Rarely, it would seem, has there been such a disparity between the literature favoured (indeed devoured) by the educated public and that which has endured the test of time as is apparent in Germany between the Restoration and the Revolution. The archive captures the spectrum of German literary production with an exceptional degree of completeness. Alongside the major authors whose reputations have survived or indeed grown, a multitude of works by forgotten writers have their place, many of them extremely rare. The complete works of Raupach, IMand and Kotzebue and the equally prolific though less known Georg Doring and Caroline Pichler; members of the ‘Dresdner Liederkreis’ like Fanny Tarnow, Graf Ferdinand August von Loeben, Wilhelmine von Chezy; authors of the trivial and immensely popular ‘Lustspiele’, ‘Singspiele’, ‘Schwiinke’ and ‘Possen’ which occupied the stages of Germany at the time, including Karl Schall, Friederike Krickeberg, August Freiherr von Steigentesch, Carl Blum and Louis Angely; the fate tragedians Zacharias Werner, Adolf Mullner and Ernst Freiherr von Houwald; the epigones Eduard Gehe, Heinrich Dohring, Joseph Freiherr von Auffenberg and Friedrich von Uechtritz; the poets and prose writers whose products filled the countless almanacs and pocket books, including Wilhelm Blumenhagen, Luke Brachmann, Friedrich Gleich, Karl Spindler, Theodor Hell and Ernst Schulze; the authors of the popular ‘Maler-Schauspiele’, like Friedrich Kind; the works of the author of Germany’s first proletarian novel, Johann Eduard Ehrenreich Eichholz. These and many others provide source material which is of vital importance for any appraisal of literary trends in the early nineteenth century. Much of it is believed to be available only in the ‘Lippische Landesbibliothek’.

Of equal if not greater interest to historians of nineteenth-century literature and culture are the periodical holdings of the ‘Grabbe-Archiv’, which also owe their presence to the untiring dedication of Bergmann. In his efforts to obtain series of all contemporary journals which contain references to Grabbe, he built up an outstandingly valuable collection of rare periodicals. With their extracts, articles and reviews these offer a further insight into the literary taste of the age and the early reception of ‘Biedermeier’ literature. Alongside relatively well-known and long-running journals like the Blatter f i r literarische Unterhaltung (ed. Heinrich Brockhaus), the Morgenblatt f i r gebildete Stiinde (its Literatur-Blatt edited by Adolf Mullner and later Wolfgang Menzel) and the Zeitung f i r die elegante Welt (edited at various times by Methusalem Muller, Ferdinand Gustav Kuhne and Heinrich Laube) there are periodicals of great rarity: August Lewald’s Europa. Chronik der gebildeten Welt (founded 1835), Friedrich Wilhelm Gubitz’s Der Gesellschafter, oder Blatter f i r Geist und Herz (1817), Adolf Mullner’s

THE ‘LIPPISCHE LANDESBIBLIOTHEK 171

Mitternachtzeitung (founded in 1825 as Mitternachtsblatt fur gebildete Stande), Georg Harrys’ Die Posaune (183 l), Eduard Duller‘s Phiink. Friihlingszeitungfur Deutschland (1843, Literatur-Blatt ed. Karl Gutzkow), C . H. F. Hartmann’s Unser Planet (1829). The collection contains the world’s most complete series of Gutzkow’s Telegraph fur Deutschland (founded 1837) and Carl Herlofisohn’s Der Komet. Ein Unterhaltungsblatt fur die gebildete Lesewelt (1830)’ including the volume for 1834, thought to be unique. Bergmann’s stated aim: ‘die Grundlage eines Instituts zu schaffen, das dem kunftigen Forscher ein moglichst reichhaltiges Vergleichsmaterial darbietet’l is admirably fulfilled by these comprehensive holdings of primary and secondary source material.

The Freiligrath and Weerth collections are smaller than the ‘Grabbe-Archiv’. The former was initiated by the poet himself in 1862, when he donated the manuscripts of eight poems to the then director of the ‘Landesbibliothek’ Otto Preui3, and since then has striven to collect as much Freiligrath material as becomes available. Although the 8,000 volumes of Freiligrath’s personal collection eventually found their way to the Boston Public Library, numerous other manuscripts, juvenilia and some 330 letters by Freiligrath figure in the Detmold collection. All first, partial and complete editions of the poet’s work are available, and the stock of secondary nArterial, like that on Grabbe, is intended to encompass books and articles to the fullest extent possible and thus to provide a basis for research. The ‘Georg Weerth-Archiv’ is much more recent. Founded in 1972 in response to the rediscovery of the poet by German scholars, it is still in its infancy. Nevertheless it contains 490 manuscripts, letters and other contemporary documents, regarded as the nearest thing to an estate that Weerth, who died in Cuba, left behind, as well as a comprehensive collection of literature on the reception of the poet. Like the other two archives it sees its aim in assembling and cataloguing all recent and future material on the writer while doing its utmost to secure sources of earlier provenance (the Freiligrath collection was able to add 58 letters by Freiligrath to Levin Schucking to its holdings as recently as 1983). The combination of the Freiligrath and Weerth collections under one roof makes the ‘Landesbibliothek‘ a particularly valuable centre for the study of ‘friihproletarische Lyrik‘ in the ‘Vormarz’, an area of German literary history which has benefited much from the recent resurgence of interest in the development of political poetry.

The work of all three archives, in their attempts to trace and obtain all material relevant to the authors in question, is complemented and publicized by the annual bibliographies of the Grabbe-Jahrbuch (edited under the auspices of the ‘Grabbe-Gesellschaft’ by W. Freund and K.-A-Hellfaier, Detmold 1982-), which provides full and up-to-date coverage of recent publications, as well as original articles on these and other Westphalian writers.

The historical origins of the ‘Lippische Landesbibliothek‘, the three literary archives which it houses and, finally, the valuable ‘Handbibliothek’ of Princess Pauline of Detmold (died 1820), which also counts rare first editions of contemporary authors among its 1,600 volumes, serve to make the library an outstanding resource base for the study of German literature in the period

172 THE ‘LIPPISCHE LANDESBIBLIOTHEK

1815-48. The collections, fully and clearly catalogued, are well worth a visit. Anyone with an interest in the complex spectrum of German culture and letters in the age variously called the ‘Biedermeier’, the ‘Vormarz’ or the ‘Restaurationszeit’ will find the archives a mine of fascinating material.2

NOTES

Alfred Bergmann, Das Grabbe-Archiu d n Lippixhen Landesbibliothek, Detmold 1973, p. 12 2 I am grateful to the staff of the ‘Lippische Landesbibliothek’ for their friendly assistance during

visits there. In particular I would like to thank Herr Klaus Nellner for placing at my disposal up-to-date information on the holdings of the archives. I have also consulted the following in the preparation of this article: Alfred Bergmann, op.cit. ; K.-A. Hellfaier, ‘Alfred Bergmann und das Grabbe-Archiv der Lippischen Landesbibliothek‘, Heimatland Lippc, 70 (1977), 40-46; K.-A. Hellfaier, ‘Die Freiligrath-Sammlung der Lippischen Landesbibliothek’, Hcimatlnnd L;ppC, 74 (1981), 34-38; D. Hellfaier, ‘Die Lippische Landesbibliothek: Regionalbibliothek fur Ostwestfalen-Lippe’, ABZ-Tcchnik, 4 (1984), 115-17. The Library’s address is: Lippische Landesbibliothek, Hornsche StraRe 41, D-4930 Detmold 1, West Germany.