12 December 2017
Christmas with the Luthers
There is an enduring story that Martin Luther invented the Christmas tree. The usual version is something along the following lines: Luther was walking home close to Christmas and, inspired by the starry sky, brought a small fir tree into the house and decorated it with candles to remind his children of the stars shining over Bethlehem when Christ was born.
A 19th-century American Lutheran tract, T. Stork, Luther’s Christmas Tree (Philadelphia, 1855) 4887.aa.61
In fact it’s pretty certain that Luther had nothing to do with Christmas trees. There’s no mention of such a thing in his letters or Table Talk, or in biographical accounts by his contemporaries. The popular association seems to go back to an engraving of 1843 by Carl August Schwerdgeburth (below) showing the Luther family gathered round a tree. As described in an earlier post, 19th-century pictures of Luther’s family life often reflected their own times as much as his, and a tree was a definite fixture of a German Christmas by the 1840s – although not in the 16th century.
Schwerdgeburth’s picture was widely reproduced and much imitated, and no doubt the growing visual association of Luther with an anachronistic Christmas tree led to the story that he invented the tradition.
Another anachronistic Christmas Tree, picture by Gustav König from Heinrich Gelzer, Martin Luther, der deutsche Reformator (Hamburg, 1847-51) 4885.f.13.
However, Luther did have a hand in another German Christmas tradition: the giving of gifts on Christmas Eve. Although there is some evidence that he and his family continued the established custom of giving small presents on the feast of St Nicholas (6 December), Luther wanted to make the nativity and the infant Jesus the focus of Christmas celebrations. Thus he encouraged making Christmas Eve the principal day for gift-giving and identified the Christkind (Christ-Child) as the gift bearer. Father Christmas (Der Weihnachtsmann) has taken over the role in some German households today, but in others the Christkind still brings the children their presents. (And German children still get gifts from St Nicholas on 6 December as well.)
‘Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her’, from Gesangbuch, darinn begriffen sind, die aller fürnemisten und besten Psalmen, Geistliche Lieder und Chorgeseng ... [A facsimile of the ‘Grosses Strassburger Gesangbuch’ of 1541] (Stuttgart, 1953). 3438.p.1.
It is said that Luther wrote his Christmas hymn, ‘Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her’ (‘From heaven above to earth I come’) for a family Christmas Eve celebration in 1535. The song reflects the angel’s message to the shepherds from the nativity story, and according to at least one 19th-century account, it was first performed to the family by a singer dressed as an angel. In the accompanying picture (below) Luther looks oddly fierce and the children rather frightened; I assume this is unintentional, as the text praises Luther as family man, poet and musician. Interestingly, there’s no tree in sight here.
‘Christmas Eve 1535 at Luther’s house’. Picture by Eduard Kaempffer from Franz Fauth, Dr. Martin Luthers Leben, dem deutschen Volke erzählt (Leipzig, 1897) 4887.g.3.
Unlike many German hymns and carols, ‘Vom Himmel hoch…’ has never really caught on in Britain, but Luther may have contributed to a German carol that is still popular here. The macaronic ‘In dulci jubilo’ dates back to the 14th century, but an additional verse about God’s grace to sinners was added in the 16th century and is often ascribed to Luther.
Christmas with the Luthers probably wasn’t quite as 19th-century artists and biographers liked to imagine it, but was clearly a happy time: one of Luther’s students once described him as being ‘very jocund’ on Christmas Eve. We hope that you all will be too, and throughout the season.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
04 December 2017
Martin Luther, family man
In 1525 the Protestant reformer Martin Luther married a former nun, Katharina von Bora. The couple had six children, four of whom survived into adulthood. Their household was a hospitable one: they also took in the orphaned children of relatives, and regularly offered a home to Luther’s friends, colleagues and students.
It became increasingly common, especially in the 19th century, to depict the Luthers and their family as an ideal of clerical marriage and the Christian home. Illustrations to popular biographies show Luther in the bosom of his family, often at the same time reflecting contemporary mores, as in the examples below. In the first, the furnishings of the house and the dress and attitudes of the figures owe as much to the early 19th century ‘Biedermeier’ period as to the reality of the 15th century, while in the second, from an 1905 publication, a positively Dickensian Luther beams over his brood.
Luther and his family. Above, from Christian Franz Gottlieb Stang, Martin Luther. Sein Leben und Wirken (Stuttgart, 1839) 1372.k.5; Below from M. Wartburger, Martin Luther: Lebensgeschichte des Reformators (Berlin, 1905) 4887.f.17.
However idealised – or occasionally saccharine – such pictures might be, they do reflect a certain reality. Luther took much pleasure in family life and his letters show that he was an observant, affectionate and proud father. There are touching descriptions of his grief over the deaths of his daughters Elisabeth (in infancy) and Magdalena (aged 13). He was, of course, a man of his times, who believed in the necessity of firm discipline and corporal punishment in child-rearing, but he recognised that the kind of exaggerated beatings he had received as a child for small transgressions, both at home and at school, were counter-productive, and that punishment should be tempered with rewards.
A often-quoted example of Luther’s paternal affection is a letter that he wrote to his eldest son Hans (‘Hänschen’) in 1530 from Coburg. Hans had recently started lessons at home and Luther was pleased to hear that he was working hard. He goes on to describe:
… a pretty and cheerful garden, where there are many children. They wear little golden coats, and gather beautiful apples and pears, cherries and plums under the trees; they sing and run about and are happy. They have lovely ponies, with golden bridles and silver saddles. I asked the owner of the garden whose the children were. And he said, “They are the children who love to pray and to learn and are good.” Then I said, “My dear sir, I also have a son, called Hänschen Luther: could he come into the garden too …?” The man said, “If he loves to pray and to learn and is good, then he too may come into the garden, and Lippus and Jost ; and if they all come together, they can play on fifes, drums and lutes, and all kinds of instruments, and dance, and shoot with little crossbows.” He then showed me a beautiful lawn in the garden, prepared for dancing, where a great many golden fifes and drums and silver crossbows were hanging.
(You can read the original here. ‘Lippus and Jost’ were the sons of Luther’s fellow-reformers Philipp Melanchthon and Justus Jonas.)
The letter’s vision of a ‘children’s paradise’ shows that Luther had a good idea of what might appeal to a little boy, and that he wanted to encourage Hans with kindness rather threats. However, Hans was only four years old, and I can’t help thinking that he would have been too young to understand this delightful vision as a metaphor for the heavenly rewards of learning and piety and that Luther’s good intentions may have backfired. Did the little boy sit down to his lessons every day hoping for the actual reward of a visit to the enchanted garden described in the letter, only to be disappointed by the realities of early modern education and disillusioned by his father’s apparent deception?
The realities of early modern education? This 19th-century picture by Gustav König imagines Martin Luther being taken to school for the first time by his own father. The teacher holds a switch and a boy who has just been beaten sobs behind the chair. From Heinrich Gelzer and Gustav König, Dr Martin Luther der deutsche Reformator (Hamburg, 1847-51) 4885.f.13.
As Hans grew older he tended to show a lack of application in his studies and lapses in his behaviour that concerned and sometimes angered his father. I wouldn’t for a moment argue that this was all the result of childhood trauma caused by a lack of ponies and golden fifes but perhaps a little bit of iron had entered into his soul when he realised that these things were not literally going to come his way. (In fairness to Luther, however, I should point out that he did bring Hans the very real gift of sweetmeats back from Coburg, which may have made a greater impression than the letter.)
Hans made good in the end; he settled to his studies and went on to become a lawyer – appropriately enough the career that his paternal grandfather and namesake had originally intended for Luther himself. He never had a son of his own, so we don’t know how if he would have used his father’s method of encouraging a little boy to study, pray and be good.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
Our free display, Martin Luther: 500 Years of Reformation, continues in the British Library Treasures Gallery until 4 February 2018.
23 November 2017
Exhibiting Martin Luther – then and now
Our current Treasures Gallery display focuses on Martin Luther to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. But this is not the first time that our holdings have been showcased for a Luther-related anniversary.
In 1883, George Bullen, Keeper of the Department of Printed Books in the then British Museum Library, organised an exhibition to mark the 400th anniversary of Luther’s birth. In his introduction to the short accompanying catalogue (‘price twopence’), he notes that the anniversary celebrations in Germany had ‘attracted … much notice and sympathy in this country’ and says that a suggestion for an exhibition ‘formed of the numerous books, pamphlets and broadsides contained in the Museum’ had been ‘cordially adopted’ by senior staff there.
Title-page of the 1883 exhibition catalogue (London, 1883) 4999.bbb.17
Looking at the catalogue, it’s gratifying to know that, 134 years later, the team behind our display selected many of the same items to exhibit as Bullen and his colleagues did. Of course it’s also inevitable since some items were such obvious choices: the 95 theses, the Indulgence that triggered them, the Papal Bull condemning Luther, the ‘September Testament’, and Luther’s first complete German Bible. A surprising omission in 1883 was Luther’s response to criticisms of his Bible translation, the Sendbrief von Dolmetschen – perhaps the more so since Bullen did show Hieronymus Emser’s attack on Luther’s translation (pictured below).
Hieronymus Emser, Auss was grund unnd ursach Luthers dolmatschung uber das nawe testament dem gemeinē man billich vorbotten worden sey (Leipzig, [1523]) 1012.c.15.
Two other choices we shared were an edition of Henry VIII’s Assertio septem sacramentorum and a book-binding stamped with portraits of Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, but those currently on display are definitely not the same as the ones shown in 1883: we have a Rome edition of the Assertio while Bullen chose a London one, and the binding we are displaying comes from the collection of Henry Davis which was bequeathed to the British Library in 1977.
Bullen had more space than our modest four cases: his exhibition was mounted in the Grenville Library, to the right of the Museum’s entrance hall (now a gift shop), where he was able to show a wider range of items. In some cases these helped add context to other exhibits. For example there were copies of other writings against indulgences alongside the 95 theses, including German-language pamphlets which took Luther’s arguments to a wider audience. Likewise the Assertio septem sacramentorum was accompanied by the pamphlet De Captivitate Babylonica Ecclesiae which inspired Henry’s response, and by Luther’s own reply to the Assertio.
On Aplas von Rom kan man wol selig werden ([Augsburg, 1520?]) 3906.b.55. A German pamphlet against indulgences, with a portrait of Luther on the title-page.
The 1883 exhibition also had space for more Bibles, including some of some of the first sections of Luther’s Old Testament to be printed, and the splendid Bible of 1541 with manuscript inscriptions by Luther, Philipp Melanchthon and other reformers.
Inscription in Luther’s hand, with the opening of Psalm 23 and four lines of commentary. From the first volume of Biblia, das ist, die gantze Heilige Schrift (Wittenberg, 1541) 679.i.15
Other exhibits from 1883 touch on areas we couldn’t accommodate, including pamphlets by Luther on theological topics, works of scriptural exegesis, and copies of his services for baptism and the mass. Bullen also found room for some manuscript letters, including one from Luther to Thomas Cromwell (MS Harley 6989, f.56) which had in fact been on my initial longlist but missed the final cut.
Examples of items shown in 1883 but not in 2017. Above: Martin Luther, Auslegung Deutsch des Vatter Unser ... (Leipzig, 1519) 3905.bbb.22, an exegiesis of the Lord’s prayer for German-speaking lay people. Below: Martin Luther, Vom Eelichen Leben (Wittenberg, 1522) 3905.dd.76, Luther’s treatise on marriage.
One theme which we chose to feature and Bullen did not was pro-and anti-Lutheran visual propaganda, such as the Passional Christi und Antichristi ([Wittenberg, 1521]; C.53.c.3.) which compares the perceived corruption of the papacy with the life of Jesus, or Thomas Murner’s attack on Luther, Von dem grossen Lutherischen Narren. Perhaps these were seen as too frivolous or too crude for contemporary tastes. A number of pictures from the Department of Prints and Drawings were shown, but these were nearly all straightforward portraits rather than propaganda prints or caricatures.
Too crude for Victorian visitors? An image of Luther being stuffed into a privy, from Thomas Murner, Von dem grossen Lutherischen Narren (Strassburg, 1522) 11517.c.33. Shown in 2017 but not in 1883
I suspect that our final exhibit of a Playmobil Luther figure and a Luther rubber duck (below) would certainly have raised eyebrows in 1883, but the display then also included commemorative souvenirs, albeit in the less frivolous form of items from the Department of Coins and Medals. And placed on a table in the gallery was ‘a statuette of Luther modelled in terra-cotta by Mr Charles Martin, after Lucas Cranach’s portrait, lent for exhibition by Mr Martin.’ No doubt a more realistic and sober representation than our souvenirs, but that in itself shows how attitudes to the culture of commemoration have changed since Bullen’s day.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
The Treasures Gallery display continues until 4 February 2018.
31 October 2017
500 Years of Reformation
On 31 October 1517 the Augustinian monk Martin Luther nailed a document to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg containing 95 theses for academic debate. The topic was the sale of indulgences – certificates granting believers time free from purgatory – in order to fund the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Luther was angry that the money of ordinary Christians was being taken to help a wealthy church establishment pay for a lavish building project, and he condemned the idea that divine forgiveness could be bought and sold rather than coming from the believer’s true spiritual repentance.
Lucas Cranach the elder, Portrait of Martin Luther as a monk. Detail from the frontispiece of Luther's pamphlet De Captivitate Babylonica Ecclesiæ (Strassburg, 1520) 697.h.21,
This has come to be seen as the start of the Protestant Reformation that fractured the religious unity of Western Europe and changed the way many Christians viewed and practised their faith. Although many historians today doubt that Luther actually did nail his theses to the church door on this or any other date, let alone in the dramatic public gesture often depicted in later images, 31 October has been celebrated for centuries as the birthday of the Reformation and in this fifth centenary year commemorations have been held all over the world.
An idealised 19th-century image by Gustav König of Luther posting the 95 theses, from Dr Martin Luther der deutsche Reformator (Hamburg, 1847-51) 4885.f.13.
The British Library is playing its modest part with a display in our Treasures Gallery looking at Luther and his impact, which opened by happy coincidence on 31 October and runs until 4 February 2018. Exhibits include an original printing of the 95 theses (C.18.d.12.) and a copy of the indulgence that triggered Luther to write them (C.18.b.18.).
The 95 Theses, ‘Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum’. Copy printed in Nuremberg in 1517. C.18.d.12.
The huge debate and controversy stirred by the Reformation is illustrated by some of the polemical pamphlets of the time both for and against Luther. One of the most famous is Passional Christi und Antichristi, with woodcuts by Lucas Cranach the elder. The book compares the life of Christ and the perceived corruption of the Papacy, showing for example Christ’s explulsion of moneylenders from the temple contrasted with the Pope raking in money from the sale of indulgences. But Luther’s opponents could attack him with equal force. In keeping with the scatalogical humour of the age, Thomas Murner’s attack on Luther, Von dem grossen Lutherischen Narren (Strassburg, 1522; 11517.c.33) includes a caricature of Luther being pushed into a privy.
Christ and the moneylenders compared with the Pope and indulgence-sellers. Woodcuts by Cranach the elder from Passional Christi und Antichristi ([Wittenberg, 1521]) C.53.c.3.
In Germany, Luther is as celebrated for his contribution to the language through his Bible translation as for his influence on religious life. We show copies of his first translations of the New Testament and of the whole Bible, the latter in a copy with beautifully hand-coloured woodcuts.
Hand-coloured title-page from the first complete edition of Luther’s Bible translation (Wittenberg, 1534) 1.b.9.
When his translations came under attack, Luther defended them in an open letter, the Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen, where he famously stated the need to listen to the everyday speech of ordinary people – ‘the man in the marketplace, the mother in the house, the children in the street’ – to create a vernacular Bible that would truly speak to them. His translation influenced William Tyndale who wanted to create an English Bible that ‘the boy that driveth the plough’ could read and understand. However, the copy of Tyndale’s New Testament which we are displaying to represent that influence belonged to someone much at the other end of the social scale: Queen Anne Boleyn.
Illuminated title-page from Anne Boleyn’s copy of The newe Testament, dylygently corrected and compared with the Greke by Willyam Tindale... (Antwerp, 1534) C.23.a.21.
This Bible is not the only English connection on display. We also show a copy of Henry VIII’s 1521 attack on Luther, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (Rome, 1521; G.1210). This earned him the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ from Pope Leo X – a title he kept for himself as head of the English Church when he broke away from Rome over a decade later. We also show a later and happier example of Luther in England: a history of St George’s German Lutheran Church in the East End of London, established for the many German immigrants who came to London in the 18th and 19th centuries. The copy on display belonged to the Church’s own library which the British Library acquired in 1997.
Title-page of Johann Gottlieb Burckhardt, Kirchen-Geschichte der deutschen Gemeinden in London (Tübingen, 1798) RB.23.a.16354. This copy, from the church’s library was originally presented to the Pastor of St George’s Lutheran church in Whitechapel by the church organist.
The language of Luther’s Bible and the spread of Lutheran churches around the world are only a part of his legacy. Luther’s belief in the importance of music in Christian worship helped to create traditions of congregational hymn-singing and of church music which have influenced church music of many denominations and enriched the canon of Western classical music, in particular through the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Luther’s most famous hymn ‘Ein Feste Burg’ is shown in an early edition along with the manuscript of one of Bach’s cantatas written for the Lutheran church of St Thomas in Leipzig.
Manuscript page from Bach’s Cantata for the 19th Sunday after Trinity, ‘Wo soll ich fliehen hin?’ (1724). Zweig MS 1
To mark ‘Reformation 500’ many souvenirs of all kinds have been marketed, and we show two examples, including the Luther figure created by the toy company Playmobil, which became its best-selling figure ever. But Luther memorabilia is nothing new: in the decades immediately after his death in 1546 Luther’s image began to appear on coins, medals, ceramics and bookbindings. Our contemporary souvenirs, like this year’s Luther commemorations, are part of a long tradition.
16th-century decorative bookbinding with a portrait of Luther, on a copy of Ius civile manuscriptorum librorum (Antwerp, 1567) Davis 628
The British Library will also be holding a Study Day on Monday 27 November looking at the 16th-Century Reformation outside Germany. Details and booking information can be found here. On the same day the British Museum and Library Singers will be performing a free lunchtime concert of music from and inspired by the Reformation in the Library’s entrance hall.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Studies
Luther’s signature from Zweig MS 200, a collection of handwritten dedications by Luther and other reformers.
25 October 2017
Storm in October: Theodor Storm at 200
In her biography Theodor Storm. Ein Bild seines Lebens, the poet’s daughter Gertrud describes how one day in 1848 his friend Harthmuth Brinkmann happened to meet him and asked, ‘What’s the matter with you, Storm? Why are your eyes shining like that?’ Storm took his friend’s hand with the words, ‘I have just written an immortal poem’. That poem was Oktoberlied:
Der Nebel steigt, es fällt das Laub;
Schenk’ ein den Wein, den holden!
Wir wollen uns den grauen Tag
Vergolden, ja vergolden!
(The mist arises, the leaves fall,
Pour wine of seasons olden!
And we will turn the gloomy days
To golden days, aye golden! – Translation: Carlyle F. MacIntyre).
In the remaining five verses, the poet reflects on the need to keep one’s spirits up and maintain a stout heart in the grey days ahead until the spring returns and ‘the world is full of violets’. The simple stanzas are full of a joyous appetite for life and a dauntless defiance of all that could blight or limit it; on one level it can be read as an Anacreontic challenge to relish the pleasures of wine and friendship, but on another it may be interpreted as Storm’s personal credo.
Portrait of Theodor Storm as a young man from Gertrud Storm, Theodor Storm. Ein Bild seines Lebens (Berlin, 1912; 010709.df.93)
In conventional terms it could be said that Theodor Storm (1817-88) did not subscribe to a religious creed at all, despite the reference to ‘unchristlich oder christlich’ in the poem’s second verse. This was unusual in the North German town of Husum where he was born as the eldest child of the lawyer Johann Casimir Storm and his wife Lucie. Storm was destined to follow his father’s profession; by the time he enrolled in the faculty of law at the University of Kiel in 1837 he was already writing poetry. On qualifying he returned to Husum and began to practise as an advocate, founded a choral society, and seemed set for a career of bourgeois stability. All that was lacking was a wife, and in 1844 he proposed to his cousin Constanze Esmarch. Although this came as a surprise to his parents, his father wrote to Constanze’s that though his son was ‘moody’ he was industrious, and the young couple’s prospects were promising. They married in 1846.
But before long, the life described by Thomas Mann as a ‘passionslose Heiratsidylle’ was to be shaken by forces both personal and political. Constanze was in many ways an excellent wife, tirelessly preserving beans and cucumbers, providing peace and stability for her husband and ably managing a growing family. However, even during their courtship Storm’s letters to her hint at a cultural and temperamental disparity which he endeavoured to bridge by suggesting reading-matter for her, including Wilhelm Heinse’s Ardinghello and the Song of Songs. There is also an implication, which he expressed more explicitly later in his ‘great confession’ of 1866 to Brinkmann, that the lack of passion in Constanze’s nature had been a drawback.
Through his sister Cäcilie, Storm had become acquainted with Dorothea Jensen, a delicate blonde girl who sang in his choir, and an immediate affinity spring up between them. Constanze faced this out serenely, befriended Dorothea, and was even prepared to take her into their home, but the probable scandal would have ruined Storm’s career, and early in 1848 Dorothea left Husum to live with relatives.
Portrait of Constanze Storm, née Esmarsch, from Theodor Storm. Ein Bild seines Lebens
That year, of course, was marked by revolutions throughout Europe, and in contrast to events in Italy, Prague and Poland, the Germans actually supported the uprising in Schleswig-Holstein. International treaties guaranteed that the Duchy of Schleswig would remain united with the Danish crown, and late in October church bells rang out for peace. Moreover, on 22 September Frederik VII of Denmark had abolished slavery in the Danish colonies. It was in this jubilant atmosphere that Storm wrote ‘Oktoberlied’.
Within a few years, though, political events had overturned Storm’s career by splitting the judicial and administrative functions in Schleswig under Danish rule, and in 1853 he moved to Berlin as an Assessor in the service of Prussia. In Berlin he had joined the literary society Tunnel über der Spree, become a friend of the writers Eduard Mörike and Theodor Fontane, and published his first volume of poems. Finally, in 1864, he was appointed to a magistracy in Husum and settled there with Constanze and their six children. A seventh, Gertrud, arrived the following May, but two weeks later Constanze died of puerperal fever; Storm blamed himself for returning to an area where the disease was endemic. Like Thomas Hardy, he expressed his guilt and regret at his wife’s death in a sequence of his finest poems, ‘Tiefe Schatten’ (Deep Shadows).
Storm and his family, from Theodor Storm. Ein Bild seines Lebens.
In the months that followed Storm sought consolation in music and literary friendships, staying in Baden-Baden with Ivan Turgenev, ‘one of the handsomest men I have ever seen – rather strange, but extremely kind’. By the end of the year he had resumed contact with Dorothea, and in June 1866 she became his wife and stepmother to seven children aged between one and eighteen. When her own daughter was born in 1868 Dorothea suggested naming her Constanze, but Storm demurred, and she was christened Friederike and nicknamed Dodo.
With domestic peace restored, Storm continued to write. Immensee, the novella by which many readers first come to know Storm, had appeared in 1849, and was followed by many others evoking the countryside around Husum with its dykes and coastline haunted by the cries of sea-birds. These culminated in Der Schimmelreiter (1888), a ghostly tale of conflict in a rural community where the outsider Hauke Haien rises to the position of dykegrave but encounters personal tragedy and a dramatic end amid the floods.
Illustration from Theodor Storm, Zwei Weihnachtsidyllen (Berlin, 1865) 012554.e.21, showing the north German coastal landscape of many of his stories
Shortly after its publication Storm died of cancer on 4 July, surrounded by his children; his last words were addressed to Dorothea: ‘My sweet wife…thoughts, thoughts, thoughts!’ No priest accompanied his coffin to the family vault in Husum’s St.-Jürgen-Friedhof, to rest deep in the land which he had loved so well and brought to life so vividly.
Susan Halstead, Subject Librarian (Social Sciences), Research Services.
02 October 2017
Luther the translator
In 1521, having been excommunicated by the Pope and declared an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor, Martin Luther was given refuge at the Wartburg Castle near Eisenach by Elector Friedrich III of Saxony, one of the first German princes to support the ideas of the Protestant Reformation. While in hiding there Luther set about translating the New Testament into German, as first part of a proposed translation of the whole Bible.
Luther disguised as ‘Junker Jörg’ while in hiding at the Wartburg. Engraving by Lucas Cranach, reproduced in Alfred von Sallet, Luther als Junker Georg ... Separatabdruch aus dem 52 Bande des “Neuen Lausitzischen Magazins.” (Berlin, 1883) 4888.bb.8.
Luther chose to tackle the New Testament first as it was the less difficult task. He was not the first to translate the Bible into German: 18 translations had appeared in print between 1466 and the early 1520s. But unlike these, which were based heavily on the Latin ‘Vulgate’, the canonical Bible text for the Catholic Church of the day, Luther went back to the original Biblical languages of Greek and Hebrew. For the New Testament he worked mainly from Erasmus’s Greek edition.
The first Bible printed in German (Strasbourg, 1466) IC.506
The work was finished in 11 months and the first edition of Luther’s New Testament appeared in September 1522. It was a great success: the first edition of 3,000 copies sold out within 3 months, and a new edition appeared in December, by which time Luther had already made many changes and corrections to his translation (he would continue to revise and amend his translations throughout his life).
Title-page of the ‘September Testament’, the first edition of Luther’s New Testament translation (Wittenberg, 1522) C.36.g.7.
The first part of Luther’s Old Testament translation appeared in 1523. Over the next 12 years, working with a group of associates, he completed the translation of the whole Bible, which was published in 1534. In that time at least 22 new editions of the already-published translations had appeared, and it is reckoned that around a third of all literate Germans would have owned a copy of one or more parts.
Title-page of the first complete edition of Luther’s Bible (Wittenberg, 1534) 1.b.9.
An important aspect of Luther’s translation was that he wanted it to reflect the cadences not of Latin, or of Greek and Hebrew, but of contemporary spoken German. He set out this idea in the Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen, published in 1530 in response to critics such as Hieronymus Emser, who in 1523 had produced a book arguing that Luther’s Bible should be ‘forbidden to the common man’ and identifying 1400 alleged errors and heresies in Luther’s text.
Martin Luther, Ein Sendbrieff. Von Dolmetschen... (Wittenberg, 1530)
A particular target of Luther’s critics was his use of the term ‘allein durch Glauben’ – ‘only by faith’ – to translate Romans 3.28 in which neither the Vulgate nor the Greek text has any equivalent of the word ‘only’. Although the concept of justification by faith alone was in fact of great theological importance for Luther, here he defended his use of ‘allein’ on purely linguisitic grounds, claiming that it was so natural in the context of a spoken German sentence that not to use it would sound foolish. He famously stated that:
We do not have to ask the literal Latin how we are to speak German, as these donkeys do. Rather we must ask the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common man in the marketplace. We must be guided by their language, by the way they speak, and do our translating accordingly. Then they will understand it and recognise that we are speaking German to them.
Luther also points out in the Sendbrief that Emser himself made heavy use of Luther’s German New Testament when commissioned by the Catholic Duke Georg of Saxony to provide a heresy-free Catholic alternative to Luther’s translation. Emser’s reliance on Luther’s text meant that Luther’s Biblical language became familiar and popular among Catholic as well as Protestant Germans.
As the Sendbrief suggested, Luther had found a way to make the Bible speak to ordinary Germans. His translation would greatly influence the German language – as the King James Bible later would English – so that today’s German speakers of all confessions and religions, and those of none, owe a debt going back to the fugitive monk who devoted his days in hiding to translation.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
18 September 2017
Bertillons and others: some language textbooks of the past
Back in 1979 my introduction to the French language – and indeed to learning any foreign language – came via a textbook entitled Le français d’aujourd’hui (‘Today’s French’) and its central protagonists, the Bertillon family, whose adventures were generally recounted in picture stories, with commentary and vocabulary, opposite a page explaining new grammar points with related exercises.
‘Voici la famille Bertillon...’, from P.J.Downes [and others] Le français d’aujourd’hui (London, 1966) Cup.1254.w.31.
La famille Bertillon consisted of Papa, Maman and three children: Philippe, Marie-Claude and Alain. They lived in the – presumably fictional – town of Villeneuve, complete with Miquet the cat and, a little later, Kiki the dog, a stray adopted by Alain in an early adventure. M Bertillon (Jean) was a customs officer at Orly airport while Mme Bertillon (Annette) was a stay-at-home mum.
Alain acquires a dog
After M Bertillon caught a smuggler at work – leaping athletically over his desk and crying ‘Au voleur!’ – he was rewarded with a bonus, enabling the family to move closer to Paris and the authors of the textbook to introduce the future tense: ‘When we are living in Sceaux I will…’. The imperfect tense was introduced in a rather less obvious way, with Philippe, inspired by a history lesson, falling asleep and dreaming of the life he would have led at various periods in the past. Our French teacher actually apologised to us for this chapter.
M. Bertillon springs into action
After the move the Bertillons also acquired a car, which Mme Bertillon (who already had one cycling accident under her belt) managed to crash while taking Marie-Claude and Alain for a day out. On seeing the damaged car, M Bertillon, who had been at a rugby match with Philippe, exclaimed ‘Sacrebleu!’, translated by the book as the surprisingly mild ‘tut-tut’. Our teacher had another translation: ‘Never say this,’ she warned us, ‘It is the French equivalent of “Gadzooks.”’
Mme Bertillon’s transport misfortunes: a cycling accident and a damaged car
Although not usually so mediaeval, Le français d’aujourd’hui, was certainly outdated by the time it fell into my generation’s teenaged hands, having been first published shortly before we were born. One of the chapters not featuring the Bertillons was a plug for ‘Concorde – l’avion de l’avenir’ and the lesson when we studied it was almost certainly interrupted by ‘the aeroplane of the future’ passing over us on its regular daily flight, its sonic boom rendering audible speech briefly impossible.
For German we had something rather more up-to-date, illustrated for additional verisimilitude with photographs taken in the city of Göttingen where the stories were set – although the wing collars and flared trousers of its mid-1970s characters seemed as hopelessly outmoded to our mid-1980s sensibilities as the Bertillons’ badly-drawn 1960s outfits.
C.C.B. Wightwick and H, Strubelt, Longman Audio-Lingual German. Stage 1 (London, 1974) X.0900/404. The cover features, clockwise from top, regular characters Herr Körner, Dieter Kollwitz, Jürgen Starnberger and Frau Schütze
As the title (surely one of the dullest for a textbook ever) implies, Longman Audio-Lingual German was also more up-to-date in its use of audio material. Listening to stories and dialogues, following the spoken narrative of wordless picture stories, and repeating phrases and sentences, all using reel-to-reel tapes in the classroom, were an integral part of the course.
A picture story from Audio-Lingual German, designed to make more sense when you heard the accompanying tape
Unlike the nuclear Bertillon family of Le français d’aujourd’hui, Audio-Lingual German featured a wide cast of characters. There was teenager Dieter Kollwitz with his siblings and his friends, but the main focus was actually on adult characters, notably journalist Herr Körner and his landlady Frau Schütze.
1970s teenager Dieter, in his 1970s bedroom, with his 1970s mother: ‘hopelessly outmoded to our mid-1980s sensibilities’
Most of these characters’ adventures, like those of the Bertillons, were fairly humdrum, except on the occasions when the writers introduced the two bizarrely useless petty criminals, Adolf and Hermann, who were presumably meant to add comic relief. In a particularly ridiculous episode, Hermann was smuggled into Herr Körner’s rooms inside a new sofa, in order to raid the premises. When this plan failed, he and Adolf, having no money for food, broke into a car to steal a sausage, only to discover that it was a plastic theatre prop. Like Philippe’s dream, this whole story triggered an apology in advance from the teacher.
We all rather assumed that Herr Körner and the widowed Frau Schütze would eventually get together, but it was not to be. At the end of Book 2, Herr Körner got a publishing deal and left Göttingen for Berlin, although his departure was inevitably hampered by Adolf and Hermann stealing his motorbike at a motorway service station, where several key characters from the books had conveniently converged.
Adolf (pillion) and Hermann (driving) make their final getaway, pursued by Herr Körner and friends
Looking back at these two textbook series, published approximately ten years apart, it is clear how much the approach to language learning, and indeed to the kind of material likely to engage the interest of secondary school children, had changed between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. With modern language studies sadly declining in UK schools, it is to be hoped that today’s textbook writers and selectors are finding ways to engage modern schoolchildren in new ways with the pleasure of learning a language.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
14 September 2017
150 Years of Capital
The British Library claims an important relationship with Karl Marx and his associates. Arriving to London as an exile in 1849, Marx became a familiar face in the reading rooms of the British Library (then part of the British Museum), making use of their extensive collections to pursue information that would later prove foundational to his famous critique of political economy, Capital. The first edition of this canonical work was received with little fanfare, selling only 1000 copies in its first four years. In 1872, Marx himself presented a copy, published in German, for our collections (C.120.b.1). The donation was acknowledged like any other, with a cursory record in a large, leather-bound index that now sits in our corporate archives. Now, 150 years since its original publication date on 14 September 1867, it is among our most treasured texts.
Marx’s donation index entry. BL Corporate Archives DH53/6
In preparation for the 2018 bicentenary of Marx’s birth, we have been tracing the course of his time with the British Library. It is a well-trodden path; few figures have been subject to as much intense historical and ideological scrutiny, and it is hard to believe that after two centuries our explorations may yield new discoveries. But it would seem that the Library still has secrets to give up. This week, consulting the donation indexes led to the discovery that Marx also presented a second copy of Capital, this one in French.
Title page of Le Capital (Paris, 1872) C.120.g.2.
The text, with its intricately-embellished chapter headings and impressive title page, is a thing to behold. Closer inspection also reveals various handwritten annotations in the margins of the page. Words are crossed out, better alternatives suggested, and minor errors deleted. In his search for a common unit of value between two comparable commodities – cloth and coat – the word toile (‘linen’) is substituted for the less accurate drap (‘sheet’):
Handwritten corrections in the donated copy of Le Capital
There is good reason to suspect that these annotations are written in the author’s own hand. The birth of the French edition was, for Marx, lengthy and tortuous. In his opinion:
although the French edition…has been prepared by a great expert in both languages, he has often translated too literally. I have therefore found myself compelled to re-write whole passages in French, to make them accessible to the French public. It will be all the easier later on to translate the book from French into English and the Romance languages. (Letter to Nikolai Danielson, 28 February 1872, MECW, vol.44, p.327)
One is inclined to feel some sympathy for the long-suffering translator, Joseph Roy, working as he was from the second German edition of Capital handwritten in Marx’s famously dreadful scrawl. Marx was a ruthless editor, and it is easy to imagine the famously rigorous intellectual leafing through the copy en route to the library, unable to resist making a few last-minute alterations.
Marx was also a constantly evolving writer, and the ideas contained in the French edition differed significantly from those of its predecessor. Notably, the much-discussed section outlining the fetishism of commodities was refined. Where the German edition concerns itself with the fantastical appearance of the commodity, the French edition foregrounds the necessary reality of ‘material relations between persons and social relations between things’. In short, then, this is a work unpopulated by phantoms; instead, we begin to see how the workings of capital come to modify the essence of human personhood. Marx himself claimed that the French edition ‘possessed a scientific value independent of the original and should be consulted even by readers familiar with German’. Still, it was long neglected by the Anglophone world, largely due to Engels’s own preference for the earlier German incarnation.
Donation index entry for the final instalment of Le Capital. BL Corporate Archives DH53/7
The donation registers show that the French edition was delivered to the British Library in six instalments, between 12 October 1872 and 8 January 8 1876. This period corresponds with various complications in Marx’s life, with frequent bouts of insomnia and liver disease affecting his ability to work. In a letter to Friedrich Sorge on 4 August 1874 (MECW, vol.45, p.28), Marx lamented that ‘that damned liver complaint has made such headway that I was positively unable to continue the revision of the French translation (which actually amounts almost to complete rewriting)’. So the staggered delivery of the manuscript likely reflects these intellectual and physical obstacles, but it is also revealing of the audience that Marx had in mind for his work. The French edition was initially published in a serialized format in workers’ newspapers between 1872 and 1875. ‘In this form,’ Marx wrote,‘the book will be more accessible to the working-class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.’ However, he fretted that the French public, ‘always impatient to come to a conclusion…zealously seeking the truth’, would be frustrated by the wait between instalments. A puzzling concern for a man whose work had hitherto been received with so little public zeal.
For the Library’s administrators, these piecemeal instalments of Capital, and interactions with its author, only proved something of a mild inconvenience. In a letter dated 17 July 1873, the Library’s Assistant Secretary wrote to William Butler Rye, Keeper of Printed Books, with the following request:
Dear Mr. Rye,
I am directed by Mr. Jones to forward to you fasc. IV of the French edition of Das Kapital. In a letter received from Dr. Karl Marx on the 15th, he says: “I feel not sure whether or not I have sent the 6th and last fascicile [sic] of the first volume of the German edition” (of Das Kapital). Would you be so good as to communicate with Dr. Marx on the object: he writes from No.1 Maitland Park Road.
Believe me,
Yours truly,
Thomas Butler
Letter to William Butler Rye, BL Corporate Archives DH4/13
Izzy Gibbin, UCL Anthropology. (Izzy is working with the British Library on a doctoral placement scheme looking at ways to mark the bicentenary of Marx’s birth, including an exhibition in the Treasures Gallery and a series of related events)
References
Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected works (MECW) (London, 1975-2004) X.0809/543.
29 August 2017
Hope, Tragedy, Myths - and Curation.
As our exhibition Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths closes, the curatorial team involved share some memories, favourite items and ones that got away.
Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator
My research on the exhibition brought me to the State Russian Library in Moscow. I’m extremely grateful to all the Russian colleagues who work there. They allowed me into their storage rooms and brought piles of folders with Soviet and Russian posters, postcards and other visual ephemera. I wanted to get on loan and show here, in London, everything: colourful candy wrappers with a picture of the brave Cossack Kozma Kriuchkov (eventually we decided to honour him in the exhibition with a poster from the British Library holdings), letter-templatess addressed to relatives from the front lines so that illiterate soldiers could send greetings home, photographs of the devastation in the Moscow Kremlin in November 1917, and many more.
Propaganda poster of Kozma Kriuchkov (Moscow, 1915) HS.74/273
But, of course, the one poster that would have been so appropriate was this one – Veriu, sotuiu vstretim godovshchinu! – I believe, we will celebrate the centenary!
Image from http://www.sovposters.ru/view/347
The artist, who created this optimistic image in a pretty avant-garde style was Iurii Bondi (1889-1926). Curiously, his works for the Kostroma ROSTA (the Russian news agency) survived and today can be seen online, although he was best known among his contemporaries as a theatre artist and set designer, whose works often inspired the great Meyerhold, whom Bondi was working with. Bondi’s book illustrations were loved and praised by another big Russian celebrity of the early 20th century – poet Alexander Blok. We did not bring this poster to the British Library and did not ‘celebrate’ the centenary, but here is our one more chance to learn about people who lived through this extraordinary time.
**************************************************************
Susan Reed, Co-Curator
Working on the Russian Revolution exhibition has been a wonderful experience, but also a steep learning curve since I am – full disclosure time! – not a Russian specialist. I found myself learning lots of things I didn’t know about Russia and the Revolution of 1917, and discovering that some things I thought I knew were not as I had believed. I even discovered an unfamiliar bit of my own national history, the intervention of British troops in Northern Russia during the Russian Civil War.
In fact it was researching British involvement in Revolutionary Russia that led to one of my more exciting moments: finding a map in the National Archives drawn by Arthur Ransome for a report advocating intervention, which showed where food supplies were most plentiful. I almost jumped out of my seat! As a child I loved Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’ books with his hand-drawn maps on the end-papers, and here was a map with the same neat handwriting and detailed annotations, only this time in a deadly serious cause.
Anti-revolutionary cartoon from the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus, 19 Februiary 1918, LOU.F549
I was also able to advise on material from my actual area of expertise, Germany, where revolutions broke out in November 1918 and short-lived soviet-style governments were established in several cities. One of my favourite images in the exhibition is a cartoon from early 1918 showing a ‘Trojan Horse’ full of Bolsheviks being towed into Berlin, an example of how fears of revolution spread through Europe following events in Russia. Of course we had less space to deal with the revolutions outside Russia, but if there’s one exhibit I’d have liked to be able to show in this context, it’s Käthe Kollwitz’s picture of the murdered revolutionary Karl Liebknecht. Sadly we don’t have a copy ourselves, and decided not to borrow one, but like so much of Kollwitz’s work, it’s a powerful and moving image.
Käthe Kollwitz, Memorial for Karl Liebknecht, 1919. (Image from WikiArt)
**************************************************************
Mike Carey, Collaborative Doctoral Student Nottingham University and BL
One thing we didn't get a chance to say much about was the impact of the Russian Revolution on the Chinese Revolution. A favourite item of mine which didn't make the final exhibit list is H.T. Tsiang's 'China Red' . The British Library has a copy signed by the author. He was a Communist, worked for Sun Yat-Sen's secretary up to 1925 during the first United Front, then emigrated to the USA when the KMT-Communist alliance split.
Cover (above) and author's signature (below) from H.S. Tsiang, China Red (New York, 1932) YD.2008.a.9385.
It's a series of letters between an émigré Chinese revolutionary in the USA and his partner who stayed behind, chronicling the split in 1926-7. It opens with a poem about Lenin which is quite eccentric:
"Lenin!
Who is that guy?"
"He is not big
Neither is he high;
He has two hands,
And a pair of eyes;
Just as human
As you and I. ..."
H.T. Tsiang ended up working as an extra in Hollywood films – there’s a show-reel of him on Vimeo playing various caricatures and stereotypes. According to one account he became known in Hollywood for an ‘R-rated, one-man, one-hour adaptation of Hamlet’ which he performed every Friday night for ‘a dozen years’ (this Slate article has more about Tsiang).
**************************************************************
Katie McElvanney, Collaborative Doctoral Student QMUL and BL
Over the past two and a half years, my involvement in the exhibition has included selecting and translating materials, developing storylines and concepts, meeting with curators in Moscow to discus loans, writing object labels and articles on women and journalism for the British Library website, and producing the timeline for both the website and the book published to accompanying the exhibition. Some of my favourite items on display include a beautiful hand-drawn wall newspaper issued by a local women’s collective in Yalta (complete with a sketch of the ultimate multi-tasking woman!) and an early Soviet propaganda poster promoting literacy.
The ultimate multi-tasking woman, detail from the wall newspaper The Yalta Female Delegate (1927) Add. MS 57556
One of the most valuable and rewarding aspects of working on an exhibition as part of a CDP is the chance to see how it takes shape over the three year period, from the early research and brainstorming stages through to the opening. As one of two CDP students working on the Russian Revolution exhibition project, I have benefited immensely from the knowledge, experience and support of a wider academic and exhibition team, as well as the wide range of British Library and CDP training and events on offer. While juggling the different aspects of a CDP is not without its challenges, I feel extremely fortunate and proud to have worked on the exhibition and to have gained such a range of experiences outside the immediate academic sphere of the PhD.
************************************************************
We'd like to thank all the many colleagues within the BL who also put so much work into the exhibition, our external lenders and advisers, and the many people who have come to visit. We hope you have enjoyed seeing the exhibition as much as we enjoyed working on it!
l-r. Susan, Katya, Katie, Mike.
07 July 2017
To the Finland Station in a not-so-sealed Train
In the weeks following Russia’s February Revolution in 1917, an increasingly frustrated Lenin was stuck in Zurich, forced to follow events from afar. Like other Russian political exiles, he had found neutral Switzerland a convenient haven when war broke out in 1914, but now it was more like a cage. Not only could he play no active part in events back in Russia, but he had no chance to influence or control them as he desired, and meanwhile the new Provisional Government was taking a course that seemed too moderate to Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks
The problem for the Russian revolutionaries in Switzerland was of course the ongoing war. The logical route home led through enemy German territory. Another option would be to travel via Russia’s allies France and Britain, but the two countries’ governments would hardly offer safe passage to people they considered dangerous agitators. In her memoirs, Lenin’s wife recalls him ‘building the most improbable plans’ – flying back to Russia by plane, or using the passports of foreigners from a neutral country.
In the end, the German route offered the most realistic hope. The German government had already flirted with the idea of funding Russian revolutionaries in the hope of destabilising Russia and bringing about her withdrawal from the war. It was possible that they might now be brought to see Lenin’s return as a means to this end.
Fritz Platten, reproduced in Willi Gautschi, Lenin als Emingrant in der Schweiz (Cologne, 1973). X.809/19902.
Swiss socialist Robert Grimm approached the German Ambassador to Switzerland to open negotiations, but it was Grimm’s compatriot Fritz Platten, who brokered the final agreement to allow Lenin and others exiles to travel by train through Germany to neutral Sweden. Platten was also given official responsibility for the party and helped to draw up a document to be signed by all the travellers, declaring among other things that they accepted the risk of imprisonment for treason on their return to Russia.
Facsimile of the document signed by Lenin and his companions, reproduced in Fritz Platten, Die Reise Lenins durch Deutschland im plombierten Wagen (Berlin, 1924) 9456.i.18.
At last, on 9 April 1917, Lenin and 31 other exiles embarked on a train at Zurich station. This has gone down in history as the ‘sealed train’, and and its journey became part of the mythology of the Russian Revolution, helped not least by Platten’s own account, published in 1924.
Front cover of Platten's Die Reise Lenins...
In fact the ‘seal’ was more symbolic and legal than physical: one of Lenin’s conditions had been that the train should have extra-territorial status, so that it could not be boarded by anyone hoping to arrest the travellers. The Russians were forbidden from leaving the train, and a chalk line on the floor marked a boundary, which only Platten was allowed to cross, between them and their German guards. But the doors and windows could be opened. Various members of the party later recalled Germans coming to speak to them and to offer food or beer through the windows, and at another point in the journey a group of German socialists even came on board hoping to speak to their Russian counterparts.
To a certain extent, however, Lenin sealed himself off, settling in a separate compartment and working on what became known as the ‘April Theses’. He was impatient to reach Russia and irritated by the high spirits of his fellow travellers who could be heard chatting, joking and singing next door. Even when the party had reached neutral Sweden and were travelling more conventionally and able to communicate with the outside world, Lenin devoted most of his time to working, networking and planning his next moves.
A final challenge came on the Finnish border, where the travellers were interrogated and searched at a British military checkpoint, before eventually being allowed to continue. At last, on 16 April, they arrived (on an ordinary train) at the Finland Station in St Petersburg, where Lenin proclaimed to a welcoming crowd the ‘worldwide Socialist revolution’ which he believed was just beginning.
Finnish Locomotive 293, which undertook the last leg of Lenin’s journey. It was presented to Russia by Finland and is now preserved at the Finland Station in St Petersburg. (Photo © by James G. Howes, 1998, from Wikimedia Commons)
Platten, who had been so vital to the journey, was no longer with the group, having been turned back at the Finnish border. He did later enter Russia, eventually settling permanently there, and in 1918 he provided another and even greater service to Lenin. They were travelling in a car together when a would-be assassin opened fire. Platten pushed Lenin down, sustaining a minor injury himself and probably saving the Bolshevik leader’s life. Despite his services to the Revolution, he later fell victim to Stalin’s purges, and was shot on 22 April 1942 – ironically, the anniversary of Lenin’s birth.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Studies
References/further reading:
Nadezhda Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin. Translated by Bernard Isaacs (Moscow, 1959) 010600.c.43. (Also available online at: http://www.marxistsfr.org/archive/krupskaya/works/rol/index.htm)
Catherine Merridale, Lenin on the Train (London, 2016) Awaiting pressmark
Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (London, 2009) YC.2010.a.13366
The British Library’s exhibition Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths is open until 29 August 2017, telling the extraordinary story of the Russian Revolution from the reign of Russia’s last Tsar to the rise of the first communist state. As part of the accompanying programme of events, on the evening of 25 July Historian Catherine Merridale and writer Viv Groskop will be in conversation about Lenin’s journey back to Russia. Details can be found here.
European studies blog recent posts
- How Bitter the Savour is of Other’s Bread? International Conference on European Political Refugees in the UK from 1800
- Werther at 250 - an 18th-Century Bestseller
- Religious Metaphors in French Caricature from 1870-71 (Part 1)
- Divided by Politics – ‘United’ by Sport? The German Unified Olympic Team
- Miracles and Fairy Tales: some German Football Stories
- Seminar on Textual Bibliography for Modern Foreign Languages 2024
- Women in Translation Month 2023
- Remembering Die Weisse Rose
- An A to Z of the European Studies Blog 2022
- Propaganda or Protest? Hans Baumann’s ‘Alexander’
Archives
Tags
- Acquisitions
- Africa
- Albania
- Alexander exhibition
- Americas
- Andorra
- Anglo-German
- Animal Tales
- Animals
- Austria
- Banned books
- Banned books week
- Basque
- Belarus
- Belgium
- Bosnia and Hercegovina
- British Library Treasures
- Bulgaria
- Captain Cook
- Central Asia
- Classics
- Comics-unmasked
- Contemporary Britain
- Croatia
- Cyprus
- Czech Republic
- Decolonising
- Denmark
- Digital scholarship
- Digitisation
- East Asia
- Elizabeth and Mary exhibition
- Endangered languages
- eResources
- Esperanto
- Estonia
- European Literature Night
- Exhibitions
- Fashion
- Film
- Finland
- France
- Georgia
- Georgians-revealed
- Germanic
- Germany
- Gothic
- Greece
- Harry Potter
- History
- Humanities
- Hungary
- Iceland
- International
- Italy
- Language
- Latvia
- Law
- LGBTQ+
- Literature
- Lithuania
- Macedonia
- Manuscripts
- Maps
- Medieval history
- Middle East
- Modern history
- Moldova
- Montenegro
- Music
- Netherlands
- Newsroom
- Norway
- Philatelic
- Poland
- Politics
- Popular culture
- Portugal
- Printed books
- Propaganda
- Publishing and printing
- Rare books
- Research collaboration
- Romance languages
- Romania
- Russia
- Russian Revolution
- Science
- Serbia
- Shakespeare
- Slavonic
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Social sciences
- Sound and vision
- South Asia
- South East Asia
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Theatre
- Translation
- Ukraine
- Unfinished Business
- Visual arts
- West Africa
- Women's histories
- World War One
- Writing