20 March 2025
Learning - and Shouting out for - German over the Centuries
This week the German Embassy in London together with the German Academic Exchange Service and the Goethe Institut UK are running a ‘Shout out for German’ campaign, encouraging students, teachers and fans of German to show their love for the language and their experiences learning and using it. As a small contribution I decided to look at some of the many books in the BL that have been helping people to learn this splendid language over the centuries.
Title page of The High Dutch Minerva a-la-mode; or, a Perfect Grammar never extant before, whereby the. English may both easily and exactly learne the neatest dialect of the German mother-language used throughout all Europe (London, 1680)
The first true German textbook for English speakers was published anonymously in 1680 under the title The High-Dutch Minerva (‘High-Dutch’ was a common term for German at the time). The author, Martin Aedler, was clearly a big fan of his native German, describing it as the “most copious and significant, majestick and sweet, perfect and pure, easie and usefull, antient and universal toung.” Unfortunately potential learners seem not to have shared his enthusiasm and the publication of the book effectively bankrupted him. Nonetheless, the work was reissued in 1685 and its failure did not deter Heinrich Offelen from publishing his Double Grammar for Germans to learn English and English-Men to learn the German-Tongue in 1687.
Title page of A Double Grammar for Germans to learn English and English-Men to learn the German-Tongue ... (London, 1687) 628.b.12
However, it was not until the later 18th century that English speakers really started to take an interest in learning and reading German, leading to the publication of more grammars and dictionaries. John Uttiv, writing in the preface to his Complete Practical German Grammar in 1796, was clearly not impressed with these, claiming that his predecessors’ work was “for the most part incomplete, occasionally incorrect and scarcely in any way sufficiently practical to expediate and facilitate the acquisition of the language”. Users of the grammars could also be critical: in our copy of Johann Martin Minner’s English and German Dialogues, published in 1813, a reader has corrected some of the English translations provided.
Annotated page of Johann Martin Minner, English and German Dialogues Adapted to the Style of Polite and Elegant Conversation for Social Life =
Englisch-Deutsche Gespräche für das gesellschaftliche Leben (Frankfurt am Main, 1813) RB.23.a.39241
The 19th century saw a massive growth in interest in German and in publication of teaching and learning aids. The language started to find its way into school and university curricula and dedicated textbooks inevitably followed, as did annotated or bilingual editions of texts that enabled learners to experience German literature as they studied. Some of these used interlinear translations, the so-called ‘Hamiltonian system’, which had the potential to cause confusion given the differences of English and German word order, as in the opening of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell pictured below.
Page from L. Braunfels, A. C. White, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. The German Text, with an Interlinear Translation, Grammatical and Historical Notes, and an Introduction Containing the Elements of German Grammar, Second edition (London, 1859) 11746.c.40. Available online
Until the mid-20th century most German school textbooks had very straightforward titles along the lines of A Modern German Course, but in recent decades things have become a bit more upbeat and scattered with exclamation marks. Our catalogue lists cheery titles such as Alle Einsteigen! (‘All Aboard!’), Stimmt! (‘Right!’), Deutsch: Na Klar! (‘German: Sure!’) and the reassuring German with a Smile. These more modern works also focus less on the theory of grammar and more on the spoken language, often enhanced by audio or online exercises.
A selection of German textbooks from the 1960s to the 2010s
Changes in the way the language is introduced is illustrated by two books aimed at younger learners, Little German Folk from 1904 and Bringing German to Life from 2015. Both begin by introducing a German family, but in very different ways. Little German Folk presents a picture of traditional nuclear family (oddly dressed in quasi-renaissance clothing) and describes them in the third person. In Bringing German to Life two children, Anna and Alex, illustrated in a more cartoonish style, introduce themselves and their family in a dialogue, and we learn that they live with their mother and grandfather (and Max the dog). Anna and Alex accompany the learner throughout the book, but the family in Little German Folk more or less disappear after the first page. Bringing German to Life also has ideas for craft projects and activities to make learning more appealing.
Above: Meet the family from Margareta Schramm, Little German Folk: a First Book for Little Children Written in the Everyday Speech of Little German Children (Shaldon, 1904) 012808.m.50. Below: Meet the family from Catherine Watts, Hilary Phillips, Bringing German to Life: Creative Activities for 5-11 (London, 2015) YKL.2015.b.932.
The British Library’s collections also illustrate how German has been – and remains – an important language for many professions and academic disciplines. We have specialised textbooks for builders, businesspeople, musicians, singers, and art historians among others – not to mention librarians!
A selection of German textbooks and readers for specific professions
There are also books from both world wars intended to help British and American soldiers to understand German in general and military terminology in particular. After the Second World War, US diplomats could turn to the German Basic Course created by the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute in the 1960s, part of which was donated to the Library in 2017.
Page from F.W. Zimmermann, An Easy Handbook of German for Soldiers, containing the chief grammatical rules, conversational phrases, essays on military and technical subjects, and a handy vocabulary (London, 1914) 12963.aaa.48.
All in all, the British Library has pretty much everything you could want to help you learn German, or to study how German has been learned over the past three and a half centuries. And once you’ve learned your German, our German-language collections on pretty much all topics under the sun are yours to explore. You can’t shout out in our reading rooms of course, but I hope I’ve inspired you to join me in shouting out for German this week!
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
References/Further reading:
John Uttiv, A complete practical German grammar, according to the best German grammarians, containing true, plain, and easy instructions for acquiring fondamentally [sic.] and expeditiously a clear knowledge of the language, both in speaking and writing (Göttingen, 1796) RB.23.a.39233.
Günter Wallnig, Harry Evered, Deutsch für Baufachleute = German for Building Specialists (Wiesbaden, 1979) X.622/11769
Doris Fulda Merrifield, Deutsche Wirtschaftssprache für Amerikaner (New York, 1989) YC.1990.b.1966
Josephine Barber, German for Musicians (London, 1985) X.439/13542
William Odom, German for Singers: a Textbook of Diction and Phonetics (New York, 1981) X.950/9336
Mary L. Apelt, Hans-Peter Apelt, Reading Knowledge in German: a Course for Art Historians and Archaeologists = ein englisch-deutscher Lesekurs für Kunstgeschichte und Archäologie (Berlin, 1984) 84/20490
George W. Turner, Axel J. A. Vieregg, J. W. Blackwood, German for Librarians (Palmerston North, 1972) 2719.x.14068
Erich Funke, Meno Spann, Fred Fehling, Kriegsdeutsch: Easy Texts in Military German for Speaking and Reading (London, 1943) 8339.aa.7.
Samuel A. Brown, William R. van Buskirk, German Basic Course, Units 13-24 (Guilford CT, 1965). YD.2019b.360
Nicola McLelland, German Through English Eyes: a History of Language Teaching and Learning in Britain, 1500-2000 (Wiesbaden, 2015) YD.2015.a.2313
19 February 2025
For the Love of Books: European Collections at the British Library Doctoral Open Days
On February 14, European Collections featured at Doctoral Open Day themed ‘Global Languages, Cultures and Societies’. Marja Kingma, Curator of Germanic Collections, delivered a presentation introducing PhD students from across the UK and beyond to navigating the collections and identifying resources to support their research. In the afternoon, our curators hosted a show-and-tell session, offering the students a glimpse into the Library's unmatched holdings from continental Europe. The selections ranged from a quirky bottle-shaped Czech book to a Russian glossy LGBT magazine and a modern illuminated manuscript from Georgia. Spoiler alert – love-themed curatorial picks proved crowd pleasers. For those who could not make it, here is a taster of what you might have missed.
Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator of Slavonic and East European Collections, Olga Topol and Hanna Dettlaff-Kuznicka, Curators of Slavonic and East European Collections, turned the spotlight on minority languages and cultures, giving voice to the Evenks, Sakha, Kashubians, Silesians, and the Gagauz people of Ukraine. It was a revelation to many of the students to learn that Eastern Europe was both linguistically and culturally diverse, with a plethora of languages, ethnicities, and religious traditions across the region.
V. A. Dʹiachenko, N. V. Ermolova, Evenki i iakuty iuga Dalʹnego Vostoka, XVII-XX vv. (St. Petersburg, 1994) YA.1997.a.2298.
Marcin Melon, Kōmisorz Hanusik: we tajnyj sużbie ślonskij nacyje (Kotōrz Mały, 2015) YF.2017.a.20547. An interesting example of a crime comedy written in the Silesian ethnolect.
Milan Grba, Lead Curator of South-East European Collections, highlighted a groundbreaking work by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (‘Serbian Dictionary’), which proved very popular among researchers with an interest in linguistics.
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (Vienna, 1818) 12976.r.6.
It was the first book printed in Karadžić’s reformed 30-character Cyrillic alphabet, following the phonetic principle of "write as you speak." The dictionary contained over 26,000 words and was trilingual, with Serbian, German, and Latin entries. It standardised Serbian orthography but also preserved the nation’s oral tradition. The dictionary’s encyclopaedic entries encompassed folklore, history, and ethnography, making it a pivotal text in both linguistic reform and cultural preservation.
Anna Chelidze, Curator of Georgian Collections, showed the students a contemporary illuminated manuscript created in 2018 by the Georgian calligrapher Giorgi Sisauri. The Art Palace of Georgia commissioned the work especially for the British Library to enrich our Georgian collections. The poem Kebai da Didebai Kartulisa Enisa ('Praise and Exaltation of the Georgian Language') was written in the 10th century by John Zosimus, a Georgian Christian monk and religious writer. It is renowned for its profound reverence for the Georgian language, employing numerological symbolism and biblical allusions to underscore its sacredness.
(Giorgi Sisauri), John Zosimus, Kebai da Didebai Kartulisa Enisa, (2018) Or. 17158
Sophie Defrance, Valentina Mirabella and Barry Taylor, Curators of Romance Language Collections, treated the students to some ... romance.
Sophie Defrance took a tongue-in-cheek approach to the theme by suggesting another way to look at (some) love letters with Le rire des épistoliers.
Cover of Charrier-Vozel, Marianne, Le rire des épistoliers: XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Rennes, 2021) YF.2022.a.9956
The volume gathers the proceedings of a 2017 conference at the University of Brest on the expression, manners, and importance of laughing and laughter in 16th- and 17th-century correspondence, with examples from Diderot’s letters to his lover Sophie Volland, or from the exchanges between Benjamin Constant and his confidante Julie Talma.
Valentina Mirabella decided to revisit the Boris Pasternak’s timeless love story ‘Doctor Zhivago’. Turns out, the history of the novel’s publication in Italy was nearly as turbulent as the story itself! It was first published in Italian translation as Il dottor Živago in 1957 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Although an active communist, Feltrinelli smuggled the manuscript out of the USSR and resisted pressure against its publication. The demand for Il dottor Živago was so great that Feltrinelli was able to license translation rights into 18 different languages well in advance of the novel's publication. The Communist Party of Italy expelled the publisher from its ranks in retaliation for his role in the release of the book they felt was critical of communism.
Cover of the 34th (in the space of just two years!) edition of Il dottor Živago by Boris Pasternak translated from Russian by Pietro Zveteremich (Milano : Feltrinelli, 1959) W16/9272
Barry Taylor drew attention to the epistolary relationship and an electric bond between the Spanish author Elena Fortún (1886-1952) and the Argentine professor Inés Field (1897-1994) with the book Sabes quién soy: cartas a Inés Field (‘You know who I am: letters to Inés Field’).
Elena Fortún, Sabes quién soy: cartas a Inés Field (Seville, 2020) YF.2021.a.15259
Fortún was the author of the popular Celia books, which followed the heroine from a seven-year-old in well-to-do Madrid to a schoolteacher in Latin America. The books give a child’s-eye-view of the world. They were censored by Franco and the author was exiled, but the books have been re-published by Renacimiento of Seville in the 2000s. Fortún’s novel Oculto sendero (‘The hidden path’) published in 2016 is seen as a lesbian Bildungsroman.
Fortún met Inés Field in Buenos Aires. Now that both women are dead, critics feel free to read the correspondence through the prism of the Bildungsroman.
Ildi Wolner, Curator of East and South-East European Collections, explored the representations of love in art with Agnes’s Hay Sex : 40 rajz = 40 drawings.
Agnes Hay, Sex: 40 rajz = 40 drawings ([Budapest, 1979]) YA.1997.a.2586
Ágnes Háy is a Hungarian graphic artist and animation filmmaker, who has lived in London since 1985. Her unique experimental style of drawing uses simple lines and symbols to convey complex meanings and associations, and this booklet is no exception. Considered rather bold in Communist Hungary at the end of the 1970s, this series of sketches explores the diverse intricacies of gender relations, without the need for a single word of explanation.
Page from Sex : 40 rajz = 40 drawings [Budapest, 1979] YA.1997.a.2586
Susan Reed, Curator of Germanic Collections, shared a fascinating collection of essays examining aspects of the love letter as a social and cultural phenomenon from the 18th century to the present day.
Cover of Der Liebesbrief: Schriftkultur und Medienwechsel vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, herausgegeben von Renate Stauf, Annette Simonis, Jörg Paulus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008) YF.2010.a.14652
The authors scrutinised letters from historical and literary figures including Otto von Bismark, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rainer Maria Rilke. The book ends with a consideration of how online messaging forms might transform the way we write love letters.
Ela Kucharska-Beard, Curator of Baltic Collections, displayed a mysterious metal box containing a booklet in English and Lithuanian, some photographs, posters and letters.
Vilma Samulionytė, Liebe Oma, Guten Tag, or The Pact of Silence (Vilnius, 2018) RF.2019.a.120
Liebe Oma, Guten Tag, or The Pact of Silence is a moving tribute from the Lithuanian photographer Vilma Samulionyė to her grandmother, a Lithuanian German Elė Finkytė Šnipaitienė. When Vilma’s grandmother took her own life in her 70s, Vilma and her sister Jūrate decided to delve into the family history. Their research resulted in a documentary film, an exhibition, and an artists’ book. Along the way the sisters face taboos, one of them being a chain of suicides in the family.
The journey into the family’s German history and their post-war life in Lithuania left them with some unsettling questions. Who was Kazimieras and was he the reason why Ella Fink left her family behind? Throughout the story letters and photographs create a link between the family in the West and in the East, between the living and the dead.
We hope you have enjoyed this virtual show-and-tell of highlights in our European collections. We look forward to welcoming you to the next Doctoral Open Days in 2026!
11 February 2025
Medieval Women at the Press
One of the exhibits in our current exhibition Medieval Women: in their own Words is the first European printed book ascribed to a female printer. The printer in question is Estellina Conat, who worked with her husband Abraham printing Hebrew books in Mantua in the 1470s. The book is an edition of a 14th-century poem by Jedaiah ben Abraham Bedersi entitled Behinat ha-‘Olam (‘The Contemplation of the World’). It was printed around 1476 and in the colophon, Estellina states: “I, Estellina, the wife of my worthy husband Abraham Conat, printed this book”. (In fact she says she “wrote” the book since the Hebrew language had not yet settled on a word for the relatively new technology of printing.) She adds that she was assisted by Jacob Levi, a young man from Tarrascon in Provence.
Final page of Behinat ha-‘Olam (Mantua, ca 1476) C.50.a.5. (ISTC ij00218520) The colophon at the foot of the page names Estellina Conat as its printer
No other book from the Conat press survives with Estellina’s name in the colophon, and she has often been overlooked as the first woman printer in Europe, perhaps because she printed in Hebrew rather than in classical Latin or Greek or the contemporary European vernaculars more familiar to western scholars of early printing. Many sources still give the name of Anna Rügerin as the first woman printer instead.
Anna is named in the colophons of two books printed in Augsburg in 1484 (around 8 years after Estellina’s work!). She was part of a family of printers: her widowed mother had married the printer Johann Bämler, and Anna’s brother Johann Schönsperger, perhaps encouraged by Bämler, set up a press with Anna’s husband Thomas. After Thomas died, Anna appears to have taken over from him and printed in her own name editions of the historic German law book, the Sachsenspiegel and of a handbook for writers of legal and official documents entitled Formulare und deutsch rhetorica (Augsburg, 1484; IB.6605; ISTC if00245500).
Colophon naming Anna Rügerin as the printer of an edition of the Sachsenspiegel (Augsburg, 1484) IB.6602 (ISTC 00024000). Image from Wikimedia Commons, from a copy in the Bavarian State Library.
Another woman printer emerged in the 1490s in Stockholm. Anna Fabri, like Anna Rügerin, took over the work of printing on the death of her husband, a common pattern for female printers in the early centuries of the industry. In 1496 she put her name to the colophon of a Breviary for the diocese of Uppsala. Here she explicitly states that she completed the work begun by her husband. As in the case of Estellina Conat, no other book survives bearing her name.
Final Page of Breviarium Upsalense (Stockholm, 1496; ISTC ib01187000), naming Anna Fabri in the colophon. Image from a copy in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris. The British Library holds a single leaf inserted in a copy of G.F. Klemming, Sveriges äldre liturgiska literatur (Stockholm, 1879) C.18.c.13.
We don’t know exactly what role Estellina and the two Annas played in the production of the books that bear their names, but it’s certainly possible that it was more than merely overseeing the work and that they were involved in the physical processes of the print shop. We know that nuns of the Florentine convent of San Jacopo in Ripoli worked as typesetters in the printing house associated with the church and its Dominican community, and a Bridgettine abbey at Vadstena in Sweden printed a Book of Hours in 1495, although their press apparently burned down soon after and was not restarted. The current BL exhibition also features woodcut prints made and coloured by another Bridgettine community at Mariënwater in the Netherlands. All this work carried on the long tradition of medieval nuns working as scribes, artists and illuminators (also richly evidenced in the exhibition), bringing it into the new age of printing.
A leaf from a music book for use in the Latin Mass, illuminated by nuns of the Poor Clares convent in Cologne in the late 14th or early 15th century. Add MS 35069
The 18th-century scholar of early Hebrew printing, Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi, criticised Estellina Conat’s edition of the Beh.inat ha-‘Olam as unevenly printed, and scornfully suggested that it might be “the effort of a woman attempting something beyond her powers.” But as Estellina and her sister-printers show, printing was indeed within the power of women and they played a part in it from the early decades of the industry. Thanks to ongoing research, and publicity such as the Medieval Women exhibition, these woman printers and their work are ever more visible today.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
References/Further reading
Adri K. Offenberg, ‘The Chronology of Hebrew Printing at Mantua in the Fifteenth Century: A Re-examination’ The Library, 6th series, 16 (1994) pp. 298-315. RAR 010
Hanna Gentili, ‘Estellina Conat, Early Hebrew Printer’, in Medieval Women: Voices & Visions, edited by Eleanor Jackson and Julian Harrison (London, 2024) [Not yet catalogued]
Sheila Edmunds, ‘Anna Rügerin Revealed’, Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History 2 (1999) pp. 179-181. 2708.h.850
Anabel Thomas, ‘Dominican Marginalia: the Late Fifteenth-Century Printing Press of San Jacopo di Ripoli in Florence’, in At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy, edited by Stephen J. Milner (Minneapolis, 2005), pp. 192-216. YC.2005.a.12149
24 January 2025
Beyond Traditional Monuments: Commemorating the Lost Jewish Community of Kaunas
For centuries Lithuania was an important spiritual and cultural centre of Jewish life. The biggest Jewish communities were in Vilnius (‘Jerusalem of the North’) and Kaunas, the second biggest city in Lithuania. Before the Nazi invasion in June 1941, around 240,000 Jews lived in Lithuania; only several thousand – around 5% – survived the Holocaust.
In the interwar period Kaunas, a temporary capital of Lithuania, had a flourishing, vibrant and dynamic Jewish community. At one point a third of the inhabitants of Kaunas – 33,000 people – were Jewish. The city had around 40 synagogues and prayer houses, including the Slobodka yeshiva, one of the largest and best known yeshivas in Europe.
Gerardas Bagdonavičius, The Old Synagogue in the Old Town, 1930. Reproduced in Aliza Cohen-Mushlin, Synagogues in Lithuania: a catalogue (Vilnius, 2010). YD.2011.b.2062
The Jewish educational network consisted of numerous Yiddish and Hebrew schools. There was a flourishing artistic and music scene. The city had a Yiddish and a Hebrew theatre, several daily Jewish newspapers, sports clubs and youth organisations. Jewish political organisations were thriving. Social welfare organisations and charitable societies took care of those less fortunate; the Kaunas Jewish Hospital cared for both Jewish and non-Jewish patients. In 1920 the Central Jewish bank was established in Kaunas, leading a network of 85 Jewish banks.
Posters advertising cultural events in Lithuanian and Yiddish, image from Hidden history of the Kovno Ghetto, general editor Dennis B. Klein (Boston, 1997). LB.31.c.9499
Football match in the Kaunas Maccabi Stadium between the Kovas Club of Šančiai and the Maccabi Sports Club, April 25, 1926, image from Žydųgyvenimas Kaune iki holokausto (Vilnius, 2021). YF.2023.a.2399
Central Jewish Bank. Image from Wikimedia Commons
During the Nazi occupation the Kaunas Jewish community was almost completely destroyed. How to commemorate those who perished in such tragic circumstances?
The 11th Kaunas Biennial, which took place in 2017, explored the theme of monuments. What is a monument? Is our understanding of monuments changing? Is there a need for different kinds of commemoration? During the biennial the participating artists created, among others, a number of site-specific performances and installations referencing Kaunas’ Jewish past.
The artist Jenny Kagan, whose parents survived the Kaunas Ghetto, in her installation Murmuration, using a video projection and LED lighting, evoked the memory of the lost Jewish community. A brightly lit up building of a former Hasidic synagogue (the lights followed the rhythm of street lighting) on closer inspection turned out to be empty and derelict. The emptiness of the building is reminiscent of an empty sky from which starlings, known for their murmurations, quickly disappear, their numbers drastically declining.
Murmuration, from Yra ir nėra = There and not there: (im)possibility of a monument (Kaunas, 2018) [awaiting shelfmark]
Paulina Pukytė curated several performances and installations for the 11th Kaunas Biennial. One of them was At Noon in Democrats’ Square. Every day at noon, from 15 October to 30 November 2017, in the Vilijampolė district of Kaunas, a singer stood facing the empty space which once was Demokratų Square. The singer sang two songs in Yiddish: Yankele and My Yiddishe Mame. The performance lasted 7 minutes.
At Noon in Democrats’ Square, from Yra ir nėra
Vilijampolė, also known as Slobodka, on the right bank of the Neris River, was the site of the Kaunas Ghetto where thousands of Jews perished during the Holocaust. On 29 October, 1941, the day of the so called ‘Great Action’, around 27,000 Jews were forced to assemble on Demokratų Square. Men, women and children stood there for hours while a selection took place. Those deemed strong enough to work were temporarily saved; the rest, 9,200 of them, were executed the next day in Fort IX, part of the city‘s fortifications turned into a temporary prison.
At Noon at Democrats Square was a commemoration of those who perished as a result of the ‘Great Action’.
Paulina Pukytė, the chief curator of the 11th Kaunas Biennial, is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and critic, and lecturer at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She will talk about the (im)possibility of monuments at the Holocaust Memorial Day event, held at the British Library on 27th of January.
Ela Kucharska-Beard, Curator Slavonic and East European Collections
References and further reading:
Paulina Pukytė, Kas yra = Something is (Vilnius, 2021) [awaiting shelfmark]
Arūnas Bubnys, Kaunas ghetto 1941-1944 (Vilnius, 2014). YD.2016.a.992
Martin Winstone, The Holocaust Sites of Europe : an Historical Guide (London, 2015). YC.2016.a.6368
Nick Sayers, The Jews of Lithuania: a Journey Through the Long Twentieth Century (London, 2024)
22 January 2025
Silenced memories: the Holocaust Narrative in the Soviet Union
Monument to children murdered in Babi Yar, Ukraine (image from Wikipedia)
‘Field of Burial’ where the ashes of murdered and cremated prisoners were scattered, Maly Trostenets, Belarus (image from Wikipedia)
In 1961, a young Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko visited the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv. He was taken there by a fellow writer Anatolii Kuznetsov. A native of Kyiv, Kuznetsov experienced Nazi occupation as a child and knew about the tragedy in Babi Yar firsthand. Both authors were shocked to see that there was no sign in memory of 33,771 Jews who had been murdered by the Nazis just in two days in September 1941. Possibly over 100,000 more people, among them prisoners of war, Soviet partisans, Ukrainian nationalists and Roma people, were killed there in the following months. However, the Soviet authorities were reluctant to collect and disclose records of those crimes. On the same day, Yevtushenko wrote a poem:
No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.
I am afraid.
Today I am as old in years
as all the Jewish people.
Cover of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The collected poems 1952-1990 (Edinburgh, 1991) YC.1991.b.6558
The poem was published in the influential Moscow newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta (‘The Literary Newspaper’) but was severely criticised by the authorities and Communist Party officials for presenting Jews as the main victims of the fascist Germany.
Immediately after the end of the Second World War, Stalin designed his own antisemitic campaigns such as the prosecution of members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee and the Night of the Murdered Poets, the campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’and the so-called ‘doctors’ plot’. Although the campaigns stopped with the death of Stalin, antisemitism in the Soviet Union was strong, and the official party line was not to accept the Holocaust as a concept. Instead, all victims of genocide and atrocities were put together under the ideologically loaded term ‘peaceful Soviet civilians’.
However, in the time of the Khrushchev Thaw artists were hopeful that their voices would be heard in the new political climate. In 1962, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No 13 for bass soloist, bass chorus, and large orchestra with lyrics by Yevtushenko. Although the symphony does not have an official title, it is known as ‘Babi Yar’. Anatolii Kuznetsov tried to publish his autobiographical book also under the title of Babi Yar. The book was seriously cut by censors but was eventually published in 1967. After defecting to the West, Kuznetsov managed to publish the book in full in 1970.
Anatolii Kuznetsov, Babii Iar: roman-dokument (Frankfurt am Main, 1970) X.900/6037
However, neither Yevtushenko, nor Kuznetsov were the first to write about Babi Yar. Probably the first poem (lost and rediscovered only in 1991) about the murder in Babi Yar was written by a Jewish-Ukrainian poet Liudmila Titova in 1941:
The order was supported by the threat of execution,
They obeyed but were shot.
Not a single candle was lit that night,
Those who could, left and hid in the basement.
The stars and the Sun hid in the clouds
From our world that is too cruel.
Liudmila Titova (image from Wikipedia)
In 1943, another Ukrainian poet and at that time a Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers (Commissars) of the Ukrainian SSR, Mykola Bazhan,wrote his response:
The grave wind blew from those ravines —
The smoke of mortal fires, the smoking of burning bodies.
Kyiv watched, angry Kyiv,
As Babi Yar was thrown into flames.
There can be no atonement for this flame.
There is no measure of revenge for this burning.
Cursed be the one who dares to forget.
Cursed be the one who tells us: “forgive me...”
Only in 1991 was a Ukrainian Jewish poet, Yurii Kaplan, able to compile a small anthology – Ekho Bab’ego IAra (‘The Echo of Babi Yar’) where he managed to include other pieces of contemporary poetry.
Page from Literatura ta Zhittia, N 2, zhovten’, 2007.
Cover of Ekho Bab'ego Iara : poeticheskaia antologiia (Kyiv, 1991) YA.1996.a.9243
In 1946, Ilya Ehrenburg, a prominent Soviet writer, published a poem under the title of ‘Babi Yar’ about the genocide of his people:
My child! My blush!
My countless relatives!
I hear how you call me
from every hole.
Together with another Jewish Soviet writer Leonid Grossman, Ehrenburg compiled and tried to publish a volume of eyewitness accounts documenting the atrocities during the Holocaust on the Soviet territories occupied by the Nazis.
During the war, frontline soldiers sent Ilya Ehrenburg a huge number of documents found in the territories liberated from the occupiers and told in their letters what they had seen or heard. Ehrenburg decided to collect the diaries, suicide letters, and testimonies related to the Nazis’ extermination of Jews and to publish the ‘Black Book’. A couple of extracts from the book were published in a magazine in 1944. However, after the end of the war, the publication was delayed several times. In November 1948, when the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was closed, the set of the ‘Black Book’ was scattered, the galleys (printer’s proof) and the manuscript were taken away. Ehrenburg’s daughter later gave the manuscript and other documents to the Yad Vashem archives and the book was published in Russian in 1980. However, that was not the full text. The first full Russian edition appeared only in 1991.
The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry : [prepared by] Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, translated and edited by David Patterson ; with a foreword by Irving Louis Horowitz and an introduction by Helen Segall. (London, 2002) YC.2002.b.953
The book documents atrocities that were committed on all occupied Soviets territories, such sites as Fort IX in Kovno (Kaunas), the Rumbula and Bikernieki Forests in Riga and Maly Trostenets near Minsk and Zmiyovskaya Balka near Rostov-on-Don.
Analysing the policy of ‘forgetting the specificity of Jewish suffering’, Izabella Tabarovsky of the Kennan Institute, points out that “by 2006, Yad Vashem, the world’s leading Holocaust Museum and research institution, found it had barely 10-15% of the names of the 1.5 million Jews who had died in Ukraine (in contrast to 90% of European Jews whose names were known)”.
At the Holocaust Memorial Day Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration, Professor Jeremy Hicks will give a talk on ‘ Representations of the Holocaust in Soviet Cinema’, which will examine further the creation of silences and gaps in memories of Holocaust.
Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator, East European Collections
References/Further reading:
Maxim D. Shrayer (2010). ‘Poets Bearing Witness to the Shoah’ in Studies in Slavic Languages and Literature (ICCEES Congress Stockholm 2010 Papers and Contributions), edited by Stefano Garzonio. PECOB: Portal on Central Eastern and Balkan Europe. University of Bologna. Pp. 59-119.
Ekho Bab’ego IAra: poeticheskaia antologiia, [sostavlenie i vstupitelʹnaia statʹiia IU.G. Kaplana]. (Kyiv, 1991). YA.1996.a.9243
A. Anatoli (Kuznetsov), Babi Yar: a Document in the Form of a Novel, translated by David Floyd. (London, 1970) W67/8178
Izabella Tabarovsky. Don’t Learn from Russians about the Holocaust. Published: February 2, 2017
20 January 2025
Through the Eyes of Terezín’s Ghetto Children
The Holocaust stands as one of the most tragic chapters in human history. Yet, through the voices of children who lived through its horrors, we are offered a glimpse into the quiet courage that endured even in the darkest of times.
The diaries of youth, written in ghettos and concentration camps, are personal testaments to the strength of the human spirit. The young writers found ways to express their creativity, and hope, leaving behind a legacy that preserves their voices.
The stories entrusted to paper carried immense emotional weight for the survivors or their families. Many of these diaries remained unpublished for decades, with some only reaching readers in the 21st century. The British Library holds examples of these works, including memoirs and writings of young people from the Terezín ghetto in German-occupied Czechoslovakia.
In the Living Quarters - a drawing by Bedrich Fritta of the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto, source: Wikipedia, public domain
Terezín, the ‘Model’ Ghetto
Terezín, called by the Germans Theresienstadt, a Nazi ‘camp-ghetto’ in operation from 1941 to 1945, was portrayed by the occupier’s propaganda as a ‘spa town’ for elderly Jews. In reality, it served as a transit hub for deportations to extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka.
It was a chilling symbol of Nazi deception, serving as a stage for efforts to obscure the true nature of their genocidal actions, including a 1944 Red Cross visit carefully orchestrated to portray the ghetto as humane.
The truth, however, lay in its devastating death toll and its role as a waypoint on the road to extermination.
Despite these dire circumstances, Terezín became a centre of remarkable cultural activity. In the face of oppression, artists, musicians and writers produced works of art, music and literature, while children found ways to express hope and imagination through secret schooling, painting and poetry.
The boy who loved Jules Verne
Petr Ginz, born in Prague in 1928, was a talented young writer, artist and editor. By the time he was a teenager, he had written multiple short stories and novels inspired by his favourite author, Jules Verne. His adventure novel Návštěva z Pravěku (‘A Visit from Prehistory’) where engineer Gérard Guiness and his son Petr confront the mysterious creature Ka-du, reflects his belief in courage and ingenuity. Illustrated by Ginz himself, it is the only surviving novel out of several that he wrote.
Illustration from Petr Ginz, Návštěva z Pravěku: roman, (Prague, 2007) YF.2008.a.22831
In Terezín, Ginz became the editor of Vedem, a clandestine magazine created by boys in the ghetto. Writing under the pen name ‘Akademie’, he contributed essays, stories and illustrations. The Diary of Petr Ginz 1928-1944, written between 1941 and 1942, provides an account of life under Nazi oppression. It was later published by his sister Chava Pressburger ensuring his voice would not be forgotten.
Cover of The Diary of Petr Ginz 1928-1944
Ginz was a prolific illustrator. His linocut, Moon Landscape, created around 1942, depicts an imagined view of Earth from the Moon, reflecting his fascination with exploration and the cosmos. In a tribute, Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon carried a copy of this drawing aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, symbolically fulfilling Ginz’s dream of reaching the stars. Tragically, both Ginz and Ramon lost their lives prematurely – Ginz perished in Auschwitz at 16, and Ramon died when Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry – but their stories highlight the importance of preserving history and art.
Petr Ginz, Moon Landscape, source: Wikipedia, public domain
The writings and art of Terezín’s children
In 1995, the Jewish Museum in Prague published the anthology Je mojí vlastí hradba ghett? (‘Is the Wall of Ghettos My Homeland?) which features writings and artwork created by children in Terezín. The collection includes texts from Vedem and other works, offering insight into the emotional and psychological worlds of young people living in extreme conditions.
Cover of Je mojí vlastí hradba ghett? Básně, próza a kresby terezínských dětí, edited by Marie Rút Křížková, Kurt Jiří Kotouč and Zdeněk Ornest (Prague, 1995) YA.2000.b.2154
The testimony of Hana Bořkovcová
Hana Bořkovcová, a renowned Czech author, also left behind a powerful diary, Píšu a sešit mi leží na kolenou: deníky 1940 - 1946 (‘I Write, and the Notebook Lies on My Lap: Diaries 1940–1946’ (Prague, 2011) YF.2012.a.13806.
Published posthumously in 2011, her writings chronicle her family’s experiences, from their life in Prague’s Jewish community to their deportation to Terezín when she was 16 years old, Auschwitz, and a labour camp in Kurzbach. Her diary concludes with her post-war life, including the birth of her son.
Bořkovcová’s account is striking for its sensitivity and strength. Her observations about life in the Jewish school and among young Zionists offer a rich cultural and social context, making her diary a valuable resource for readers and historians alike.
Documenting the unimaginable
In 2012, Michal Kraus published his diary, originally written in Czech, which was later translated into English and published in 2016 under the title Drawing the Holocaust. His entries are marked by stark realism and are accompanied by detailed drawings. Kraus’s meticulous documentation provides an unflinching account of the brutality of the Holocaust and its impact on those who survived. The diary also reflects Kraus’s struggle to return to a ‘normal’ life after the war.
Michal Kraus, Drawing the Holocaust: A Teenager’s Memory of Terezin, Birkenau, and Mauthausen (Cincinnati, 2016) YKL.2016.a.8040
A story saved in the walls
Helga Weissová’s diary is another remarkable testament. Starting at age nine, she documented her life during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Like Petr Ginz, Helga was sent to Terezín before being deported to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Her diary is accompanied by her drawings, which vividly depict her experiences. Before her deportation, Weissová entrusted her diary to her uncle, who hid it within the walls of Terezín. After the war, she recovered and expanded it to include her harrowing memories from the camps. Published decades later, her work offers a powerful narrative.
Cover of Helga’s Diary: a Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp (London, 2013) YC.2013.a.16374
The importance of remembrance
As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 2025, it is imperative to reflect on the significance of these personal narratives. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where over a million people perished. Just like Petr Ginz, many of those who lost their lives in Auschwitz were first imprisoned in Terezín before being transported to their deaths. The diaries of these individuals are not merely archival records; they are powerful reminders of the human capacity for resilience and creativity in the face of adversity. Their writings challenge us to remember the past and to educate future generations about the dangers of hatred and intolerance. By reading and sharing these stories, we preserve their voices and the lessons they left behind for a better, more compassionate world.
Olga Topol, Curator Slavonic and East European Collections
06 January 2025
Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration. Holocaust Memorial Day 2025
Join us on Monday 27 January 2025 for the event ‘Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration’ and explore how the Holocaust has shaped memory, identity, and culture. Bringing together scholars, historians, and artists, this conference examines the Holocaust’s profound and enduring impact, as well as the varied methods used to preserve its legacy.
From antisemitism in post-First World War Hungary, the Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust, and the commemoration of hidden killing sites in postwar Poland, to Soviet depictions of the Shoah in film and contemporary counter-monument approaches, the programme offers insights into Holocaust memory and its ongoing significance.
‘Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration’ event poster
The conference is organised by the European Collections section of the British Library in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute. The event is open to all, and attendance is free, but registration is required. Booking details can be found here.
Programme:
Date: 27 January 2025
Location: Eliot Room, Knowledge Centre
Time: 2 pm – 5 pm
- Antisemitic versus Jewish Humour in Budapest Post-WWI
Prof. Dr Béla Bodó, Department of East-European History, University of Bonn - The Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust
Dr Halik Kochanski, Writer and Historian, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society - ‘The grave […] has been planted over with potatoes’: Transnational Jewish Fight to Commemorate Holocaust Killing Sites in Poland in the First Postwar Decades
Dr Janek Gryta, Lecturer in Holocaust History, University of Southampton - Representations of the Holocaust in Soviet Cinema
Prof. Jeremy Hicks, Professor of Russian Culture and Film, Queen Mary University of London - There and Not There: (Im)Possibility of a Monument
Paulina Pukyte, Interdisciplinary Artist, Writer, Curator, and Critic, Vilnius Academy of Arts - Poetics of the Archive in Marianne Rubinstein’s ‘C’est maintenant du passé’ and Ivan Jablonka’s ‘Histoire des grands-parents que je n'ai pas eus’
Dr Diane Otosaka, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Holocaust Literature, University of Leeds
02 January 2025
New Year, Old Years: a Look Back
Usually around the start of a new year we look back over our previous year’s blogging before turning our faces to the future. This time we’re actually looking back over 2023 as well as 2024 because BL blogging activity was suspended for a while following the cyber-attack on the Library in October 2023, so we couldn’t do a review of that year at the time. And to break up the prose, we include some wintery scenes from the BL’ s Flickr stream.
Reindeer from Sophus Tromholt, Under Nordlysets Straaler. Skildringer fra Lappernes Land (Copenhagen, 1885) 10280.eee.13.
Both years saw our usual excitement over the annual European Writers’ Festival held in May. In 2023 we featured an interview with Greek Cypriot writer Anthony Anaxagorou, winner of the 2024 RSL Ondaatje Prize, while in 2024 we published a series of posts, beginning with this one, profiling some of the authors featured in the festival. As usual, literature featured in many other posts. We celebrated the award of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature to Norway’s Jon Fosse and mourned the death in 2024 of Albanian author Ismail Kadare. We were proud to learn that our Curator of Italian, Valentina Mirabella, was one of the judges of the 2024 Premio Strega, a major Italian literary prize, and she wrote about her experience for us.
A theme that ran through both years was the work of the Endangered Archives Project to preserve cultural heritage from Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Our coverage included posts on the indigenous peoples of Siberia, minority communities in Bulgaria, an important Serbian family archive, and material relating to the Ukrainian writer Taras Shevchenko, who was also the subject of a small display in our Treasures Gallery.
Polar scene from Die zweite Deutsche Nordpolarfahrt in den Jahren 1869 und 1870, unter Führung des Kapitän Karl Koldewey, edited by Alexander Georg Mosle und Georg Albrecht (Leipzig, 1873-4) 10460.ff.11.
Events in the library are a regular source of inspiration for our blog posts. In 2023 we highlighted events commemorating two colleagues who died in recent years: a symposium on Italian Futurism was dedicated to the memory of Chris Michaelides, former curator of Italian and Modern Greek, who did much to build our collection of Futurist books. The Graham Nattrass Lecture, in memory of the former Head of Germanic Collections is an annual event, and in 2023 marked the 80th anniversary of the arrest and execution of members of the German resistance group ‘Die Weisse Rose’. A conference on European political refugees in Britain generated posts on the same topic, including one on how the then British Museum Library became ‘a lifeline of books’ for Polish refugees from Soviet and Nazi occupation. On a lighter note, we celebrated the BL’s annual Food Season in May 2024 with a post introducing a selection of cookbooks from around the continent.
In summer 2024 we went a bit sports mad with both the European Football Championships and the Summer Olympics taking place. We highlighted the world-beating football tactics of the Hungarian ‘Golden Team’ in the early 1950s and the ‘Miracle of Bern’ that saw them unexpectedly beaten by West Germany in 1954’s World Cup, as well as exploring why the Dutch fans show symptoms of ‘orange fever’ at international matches. Our Olympic posts included explorations of the political side of the supposedly apolitical games in Czechoslovakia and the two German states during the Cold War, and a look at the Baltic States’ love for (and proud record in) basketball.
The northern lights, from Emmanuel Liais, L’Espace céleste et la nature tropicale, description physique de l’univers (Paris, 1866) 10003.d.10.
But not all our blog posts are driven by events and unifying themes. As ever, we continued to write about items from our vast and varied collections, from Georgian manuscripts to contemporary Queer writing in Poland, via a Russian Braille edition of The Hobbit, French caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War, and pamphlets from the Cypriot independence campaign. We also explored stories of the Slovenian Enlightenment and the first Professor of Spanish in Britain, and discovered the hidden but crucial role played by women in underground publishing under the Polish Communist regime.
As we head into 2025 we would like to wish all our readers and contributors a very happy new year. We look forward to bringing you another year of stories and discoveries from the Library’s European Collections.
Susan Reed and Hanna Dettlaff-Kuznicka, European Studies Blog Editors
Ice-skating, from A.J. van der Aa, Ons Vaderland en zijne Bewoners (Amsterdam,1855-57) 10270.f.5
18 November 2024
The wolf children of East Prussia
When Alvydas Šlepikas’ book Mano vardas – Marytė (‘My name is Marytė’) was published in Lithuania in 2011, it caused a nationwide discussion. Beautifully written and based on historical facts, it was the most read novel in Lithuania in 2012. Since then this multi-award winning book has had numerous editions in Lithuania and has been translated into many languages. Its excellent English translation by Romas Kinka was published under the title In the Shadows of Wolves.
Cover of Mano vardas – Marytė (Vilnius, 2018) YF.2019.a.12103
Cover of In the Shadows of Wolves (London, 2019) Nov.2022/1050
Mano vardas – Marytė tells a story of a group of ‘wolf children’ from East Prussia (vilko vaikai in Lithuanian, Wolfskinder in German) who found their way to Lithuania. Who were the wolf children and why, for decades, was their existence surrounded by silence?
During the Second World War, in August 1944, the Royal Air Force heavily bombed Königsberg, the capital of the enclave of East Prussia, then part of the territory of the German Reich. The mediaeval city, home of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, was almost completely destroyed. A month later the Red Army reached this part of Germany. The battles continued until April 1945. With adult men fighting on the front, the civilian population consisted of women, children and elderly men. Once in East Prussia, the Soviet soldiers took revenge on the civilians for the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the war. Towns and villages were plundered and turned into wasteland; brutal killings and mass rapes were widespread. Famine soon followed, so severe that cases of cannibalism were recorded.
Map of East Prussia in 1939. Image from Wikimedia Commons
Postcard of Königsberg before the Second World War from Königsberg in alten Ansichtskarten (Würzburg, 2001) YA.2003.a.25095
Königsberg in August 1944. Image from Wikimedia Commons
Thousands of children became orphaned. They witnessed unimaginable horrors: killings, rapes, death of their siblings – one by one – from starvation, hypothermia and typhoid. Sometimes mothers approached farmers from neighbouring Lithuania, who were allowed to come to East Prussia and sell their produce, and offered their older children as farm workers in exchange for food; it gave those children – and their starving siblings – a chance of survival. Some children were sent out in search of food by their families, or volunteered themselves, crossing the border with Lithuania by stowing away on trains or crossing the frozen Nemunas river. Traumatised, they hid in the forests and moved, on their own or with younger siblings in tow, from village to village, begging, stealing, foraging for food and looking for shelter.
Some Lithuanian farmers took pity on these vokietukai (little Germans), and took them in as farm workers. Those children who still had families in East Prussia took hard-earned food across the border to share with their starving mothers and siblings. The lucky ones were adopted by Lithuanian families and treated as their own. The not so fortunate ones were exploited as cheap labour. The children were split from their siblings and had to move from place to place, from family to family, uprooted again and again. Whatever their situation, the wolf children were still grateful they had something to eat and a place to stay. The price they had to pay for survival, however, was their identity. The title of Šlepikas’ book is a Lithuanian phrase the main protagonist, a girl called Renate, is taught by her mother: my name is Marytė. She repeats it again and again when she gets to Lithuania. Being German is dangerous so German Renate becomes Lithuanian Marytė.
Two brothers from East Prussia, begging for food in Vilnius in May 1947. ‘Wolf children on Lithuanian farms’, from Imagining Lithuania: 100 years, 100 visions: 1918-2018 (Vilnius, 2018) [awaiting shelfmark]
German children adopted by Lithuanians were often given new Lithuanian names and new identities. Sometimes helpful priests falsified parish records. The adoptive parents and their families risked severe punishment by the Soviet authorities and lived in constant fear of the truth coming out. As a result most of the wolf children received very little schooling; many were illiterate and ended up living in poverty. It was only after the fall of communism that their identities could be safely revealed. Some of the wolf children only found out that they were German when they were elderly. With no original documents or with documents containing wrong or incomplete information, they faced an uphill struggle to find their German roots. Some managed to find relatives in Germany; for some it was too late. Having forgotten their native language, some re-learnt German to be able to communicate with their families. There were stories of happy reunions but sometimes wolf children were met with suspicion from their German relatives, or outright rejection. They were often uneducated, didn‘t know the language; they were seen as a possible burden.
For decades after the war, the wolf children of East Prussia didn’t get much attention in Germany, either. The country had to reckon with its Nazi past and the accompanying guilt; there was reluctance about presenting Germans – even innocent children – as victims of war. In addition, the wolf children who managed to get to Germany were unwilling to talk about their experiences, too traumatic to revisit.
In any military conflict children can become collateral damage and erased from history. Mano vardas – Marytė gives voice to those who, for decades, have been forgotten. The book is not just a story of loss and unimaginable suffering but also of love, resilience, and hope against all odds.
Ela Kucharska-Beard, Curator Slavonic and East European Collections
References and further reading:
Norbertas Černiauskas, ‘Wolf children on Lithuanian farms’, in Imagining Lithuania: 100 years, 100 visions: 1918-2018 (Vilnius, 2018) [awaiting shelfmark]
Sonya Winterberg with Kerstin Lieff, The wolf children of Eastern Front: alone and forgotten (Barnsley, 2022)
Population displacement in Lithuania in the twentieth century, edited by Tomas Balkelis and Violeta Davoliūtė (Leiden, 2016). YD.2016.a.1761
Displaced children in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1915-1953, edited by Nick Baron (Leiden, 2016). YD.2017.a.1602
Sigita Kraniauskienė, Silva Pocytė, Ruth Leiserowitz, Irena Šutinienė, Klaipėdos kraštas 1945-1960 m.: naujos visuomenės kūrimasis ir jo atspindžiai šeimų istorijose (Klaipėda, 2019). YF.2021.a.9595
Christopher Spatz, Ostpreußische Wolfskinder: Erfahrungsräume und Identitäten in der deutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft (Osnabrück, 2016). YF.2016.a.15325
Ruth Maria Wagner, Königsberg in alten Ansichtskarten (Würzburg, 2001). YA.2003.a.25095
14 November 2024
Marx versus Kinkel – a tale of two newspapers
On 15 November we are hosting a conference on European Political exiles and émigrés in Britain. This is one of a series of blog posts on the same topic. Conference details can be found here. Attendance is free, but registration is required.
If you were asked to name the most famous German political refugee in 19th-century Britain, you’d probably choose Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels. But at the time, Marx and Engels were comparatively little known outside a relatively small faction of communists. In wider émigré circles and among the British public, a far more familiar name was that of Gottfried Kinkel, an academic, writer and revolutionary who had arrived in London in November 1850 after making a dramatic escape from Spandau prison.
Gottfried Kinkel in the early 1860s (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
Marx would no doubt be delighted to know that his fame today far eclipses Kinkel’s because he thoroughly despised Kinkel, considering him to be a self-aggrandising third-rate writer and thinker. And since Marx was never one to nurse his dislikes quietly, his letters and other writings, especially the posthumously-published Die großen Männer des Exils (Heroes of the Exile) are full of vitriol against Kinkel and his allies.
While Marx’s dismissal of Kinkel’s work was doubtless based on genuine conviction, it’s not hard to see an element of envy there too. In the decade following his arrival in London, Kinkel began to make quite a name for himself as a teacher and lecturer, and was respected by other revolutionary exiles, especially those of the middle class, in a way that Marx could only dream of. At the end of the 1850s, Marx’s loathing would be further exacerbated when both men became involved with newspapers.
First Issue of Kinkel’s newspaper Hermann, 8 January 1859. NEWS14565
In 1859 Kinkel founded a newspaper for Germans in London, naming it Hermann, after the ancient Germanic leader who defeated the Roman army. Hermann did not appear in a vacuum. Various German papers had been published in London since 1812 in an attempt to serve a growing German community and the arrival of political exiles after 1848 had led to a number of new Anglo-German newspapers with a more radical slant, most of them short lived as was the case with many such ventures. A few issues of Marx’s own Neue Rheinische Zeitung (‘New Rhenish Journal’) had been edited from London in 1850, but Marx had been involved with later London titles as a contributor rather than an editor. Now, with Kinkel promoting his own newspaper (which Marx and Engels cynically referred to as ‘Gottfried’), Marx felt more strongly the need for a similar platform of his own.
First issue of Das Volk, 7 May 1859. NEWS14239
A solution appeared in the form of Das Volk (‘The People’). This was founded in May 1859 by the Communist Workers’ Educational Association to replace a previous title, Die neue Zeit (‘The New Age’) which had recently folded. Again, Marx was initially only a contributor, but he very much approved of the paper (and of its strong opposition to Kinkel) and gradually sought to increase his influence on it. Although never officially its editor, he was effectively carrying out the role by mid-July, with Engels helping the venture financially. As Das Volk became increasingly a mouthpiece for Marx’s ideas it began to lose readers, and it closed in August. Marx, with typical self-confidence, blamed the paper’s demise on its readers’ failure to appreciate the quality of his work. He was also convinced that Kinkel was deliberately working to sabotage potential rivals to Hermann.
Whether by fair means or foul, Hermann certainly thrived. Kinkel’s name was seen as a guarantee of quality to many fellow exiles as well as to other Germans immigrants and even to some British readers. Although the paper promoted broadly liberal politics, it also reported on arts and culture and, crucially, on the activities of German clubs, organisations and institutions in Britain. Das Volk had initially also covered the latter, but this declined under Marx’s control, alienating readers who wanted a more general newspaper for their community. Kinkel and Herrmann also made much of the celebrations in November 1859 of Friedrich Schiller’s centenary, an event that transcended political allegiances and helped unite Germans in Britain in a show of cultural pride.
Illustrated page from Hermann issue 44, 12 November 1859, with portraits of Schiller’s parents and wife as part of an article about the 1859 London Schiller Festival
Hermann would survive, under different editors and with changes in its political direction, into the 20th century, the longest run of any Anglo-German newspaper. Only the ban on German publishing in Britain on the outbreak of war in 1914 put an end to its appearance.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
References/further reading:
Christine Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialism in Britain, 1840-1860 (London, 2006) YC.2007.a.3912
Susan Reed, ‘A modest sentinel for German interests in England: The Anglo-German Press in the Long Nineteenth Century’ in Stéphanie Prévost and Bénédicte Deschamps (eds.), Immigration and Exile Foreign-Language Press in the UK and the US: Connected Histories of the 19th and 20th Centuries (London, 2024) [Not yet catalogued]
European studies blog recent posts
- Learning - and Shouting out for - German over the Centuries
- For the Love of Books: European Collections at the British Library Doctoral Open Days
- Medieval Women at the Press
- Beyond Traditional Monuments: Commemorating the Lost Jewish Community of Kaunas
- Silenced memories: the Holocaust Narrative in the Soviet Union
- Through the Eyes of Terezín’s Ghetto Children
- Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration. Holocaust Memorial Day 2025
- New Year, Old Years: a Look Back
- The wolf children of East Prussia
- Marx versus Kinkel – a tale of two newspapers
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