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The Collection of German Literature 
The Collection of German Literature, one of the oldest special collections at Yale, contains first editions and other rare literary texts in German from approximately 1600 to 1850, with scattered holdings of earlier authors and a few specialized gatherings of twentieth-century material. The areas of greatest strength are the seventeenth century and Goethe. Like many library collections at Yale, the origins of the German Literature Collection reach back into the history of the university. In the late decades of the nineteenth century, German book collecting was encouraged by Yale officers and faculty who had received their graduate education in Germany. Alfred Lawrence Ripley, 1878, for example, who taught German at Yale after studying in Berlin and Bonn, took particular interest in the library during his thirty-four years as a fellow of the Yale Corporation. University librarian John Christopher Schwab, 1886, grandson of the German author Gustav Schwab, encouraged several programs to increase Yale's German holdings. Given this atmosphere, it is not surprising that Yale sought out William A. Speck, a German-American pharmacist from Haverstraw, New York, who by 1913 had amassed the largest private Goethe library outside Germany. The collection was acquired for Yale, and Speck served as its curator for the rest of his life, adding books and manuscripts with funds provided largely by the university. When he died in 1928, the Speck Collection had tripled in size to embrace some 20,000 books and as many prints, manuscripts, broadsides, and miscellaneous materials. By establishing Yale's interest in collecting German literature, the Speck Collection served as a beacon that attracted other materials. The Kohut Heine collection came in 1930, the Winkler archive in 1938. In the same year Thomas Mann founded a collection of his books and manuscripts at Yale, and in the 1940s and 50s other authors and collectors exiled from Germany enriched the library's collections. In 1944 Yale acquired the Faber du Faur library of seventeenth-century literature, Faber serving as curator for the next two decades. Faber in turn facilitated the acquisition of the papers of the publisher Kurt Wolff. Hermann Broch, who died in New Haven in 1951, bequeathed his papers to the German Literature Collection, and in 1957 a collection of Rilke's printed works was added. Particular areas of strength in the German Literature Collection are described below: The German Collection contains a small number of books published before 1600, including such rarities as the first folio edition of Hans Sachs (5 volumes, 1558-79) and a copy of the original edition of Emperor Maximilian I's Theuerdank (1517). German books and pamphlets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are found in abundance in the general collection at the Beinecke Library. The seventeenth-century holdings of the German Literature Collection, some 2,800 titles, are based on the collection of Curt von Faber du Faur (1890-1966), a descendant of the publishing family Cotta and one of the founders of the Munich auction house Karl & Faber (now Hartung & Hartung). He began to form his library while he was a book dealer, and his collecting gained impetus during the preparation of the auction catalog for the Victor Manheimer collection in 1927, a project on which he collaborated with Karl Wolfskehl. Faber came to the United States in 1939, going first to Harvard. Five years later Yale negotiated the acquisition of his book collection, offering Faber a curatorial position and a faculty appointment, both of which he held until his death in 1966. During his years at Yale, Curt von Faber du Faur augmented the collection in areas where his original holdings were relatively sparse--Catholic writing, Pietism, Jesuit drama, and Rosicurianism. Many of these later additions were made through purchases from the library of Richard Alewyn and through exchange with Harold Jantz, whose collection is now at Duke University. To suggest the scope of the Faber du Faur collection, a few items might be mentioned here. There is an unusual group of song texts in the Italian style, by poets who were precursors of Martin Opitz's reform of German poetics. The works of Opitz himself are well represented, as are those of the Nuremberg writers--Klaj, Birken, and Harsdörffer. Almost all Grimmelshausen editions published during the author's lifetime have found their way to Yale, including the only known perfect copy of the first edition of Das wunderbarliche Vogel-Nest (1672). There is a first edition of Moscherosch's Philander von Sittewald (1640), one of seven known copies. Faber gave special attention to collecting the works of the Viennese preacher Abraham à Sancta Clara, of Johann Rist, and of Christian Weise. Johannes Praetorius, the eccentric recorder of Rübezahl and other folk tales, was a particular hobby. There are also Logau's epigrams, Erstes Hundert Teutscher Reimen-Sprüche (1638), one of three known copies, and the scarce Kühlpsalter of Quirin Kuhlmann, with all four parts in one tiny volume (1684-86). Another rarity is a copy of the first printing of Paul Gerhardt's Geistliche Andachten (1667), obtained from the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, which holds the other known complete copy. Most of the volumes in Faber's original collection are remarkably well preserved--the result of a watchful bookdealer substituting better copies as they came into his hands. The seventeenth-century portion of the German Literature Collection has been described in the two volumes of Curt von Faber du Faur's German Baroque Literature (New Haven, 1958 and 1969). Almost all of the 2,500 titles listed in this bibliography are commercially available on microfilm from Research Publications, Inc. (now doing business as Primary Source Microfilm, a Gale imprint), which also issued a guide to the films in 1971, a volume that reproduces the Yale University Library catalog cards for the books. Over 200 titles have been added since the publication of the second volume of the Faber du Faur catalog and the filming of the collection; compilation of the third volume of the catalog is underway. While Faber du Faur's main collecting interest was the baroque period, he nevertheless brought to Yale an outstanding group of eighteenth-century books, many of them illustrated editions. This core has been supplemented over the years with purchases and transfers from Sterling Library to create increasingly strong holdings for the eighteenth century. There are large gatherings of works by the Hainbund poets, rare items from the Sturm und Drang, and excellent collections of printed works by Christoph Martin Wieland, Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, and the Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater. In addition to Lavater's printed works, there are a few manuscripts and physiognomic drawings. An extensive collection of printed works by Lessing came from three sources. Lessing titles held in the Speck Collection and those brought to Yale by Faber du Faur were supplemented in 1947 by the Lessing library of Sigmund Schott, 444 titles by and about Lessing. Around 40 percent of this material was added to the German Literature Collection; the rest--duplicates and secondary literature--went to Sterling Memorial Library. The Beinecke collection includes rare early works such as the comedy Die alte Jungfer (1749) and the first collected edition of Lessing's works, published in six volumes by Voss (Schrifften, 1753-55). William A. Speck's interest in Goethe dated back anecdotally to his boyhood reading of Götz in Hoboken Academy. Despite his fascination with Goethe, Speck followed his family's plan and became a pharmacist, devoting every spare moment and penny, however, to Goethe. His collecting had two main thrusts: philology and biography. Because the critical edition of Goethe's works, the 143-volume Weimarer Ausgabe, was not yet complete, Speck felt compelled to amass every printing of every work by Goethe made during the author's lifetime. On the other hand, the person Goethe fascinated William Speck: he made several trips to Weimar, where he went up and down the streets in search of Goethe relics. He even brought back pressed flowers from Goethe's garden and taught a course in Yale College about Goethe's personality and physical appearance. The resulting collection has as its mainstay an extensive gathering of Goethe's works. Every collected edition issued up to 1832 is present, as are most of the bibliographically important editions after Goethe's death. All of the Goethe first editions are held at Yale, as are almost all variants and later printings through the mid-nineteenth century. There are extensive groups of translations of Goethe's works, into both familiar and exotic languages. Illustrated editions have been collected, as well as some fine press books. Some of Goethe's works have been collected in special detail. Faust, the principal example, is treated separately in this article. There is a great deal of material on Werther, including English adaptations and parodies of the novel in prose, poetry, music, and prints. Many pre-Goethe texts of Reinecke Fuchs are also present. The German Literature Collection includes a growing number of literary annuals and almanachs from Goethe's time. These volumes were originally collected because they contain suites of illustrations, contributions by Goethe, and first printings of works by other canonical authors. They have gained interest in recent years because they offer a cross-section of the literary tastes of the time, and because they preserve the work of women writers. Goethe's life is thoroughly documented by biographies, editions of conversations and correspondence, maps, and prints; contemporary reaction to Goethe and his works may also be studied in detail. Materials relating to Goethe's associates--his relatives, his friends, his amours, personalities of the Weimar court--have also been collected in depth. The Speck manuscripts include a few poems and quotations in Goethe's hand, three original drawings by him, and a number of letters, some of which are in secretarial hands. The Speck manuscript collection is rich in materials reflecting the British reception of Goethe. There are for instance autograph poems that Goethe wrote for the Carlyles and letters from Carlyle to Eckermann after Goethe's death. Coleridge's manuscript translation of "Mignons Lied" is present, as are manuscripts by two little-known Faust translators: George Henry Borrow's version of the "Walpurgisnacht" scene from Faust I and Jonathan Birch's translation of Faust I and part of Faust II, published respectively in 1839 and 1843. Many of the materials in the Speck collection are listed in Carl F. Schreiber's catalog, Goethe's Works with the Exception of Faust (New Haven, 1940). In pre-Depression days, this catalog was ambitiously planned as a four-volume work, modeled on the catalog of the Kippenberg Sammlung. The second volume was of course to have described Faust materials, the third volume would have listed biographical material on Goethe, and the fourth volume was to have brought addenda and a much-needed index. The illustrations and facsimiles for all four volumes were printed in Germany in the 1930s, but plans were never brought to fruition. The Faust volume has in all likelihood been eclipsed by Hans Henning's massive Faust bibliography, and the Speck catalog, its title boldly announcing its own deficit, stands as a monument to different times. Goethe's Faust and Faust literature have been sought out by the library since 1922 when Speck purchased from the Zwickau collector George Wilhelm Heinrich Ehrhardt some 6,000 items of Faustiana, including newspapers, magazines, playbills, and programs related to the theater history of Faust, as well as materials pertaining to the historical Faust and a large group of commentaries, parodies, translations, continuations, and critical studies of Goethe's Faust. To Speck's embarrassment at the time, Ehrhardt's 6,000 items hardly overlapped the 2,500 Faust items he already owned: he had expected to recoup some of the cost of the collection through the sale of duplicates. From a different source, Speck acquired a fragment from Act 5 of Faust II ("Offene Gegend") in Goethe's hand. The collection also includes several Höllenzwang manuscripts and a group of nineteenth-century handwritten Faust puppet plays. Illustrated editions of Faust from both the nineteenth and the twentieth century are well represented. The Speck Collection contains numerous printed and manuscript scores, most of them from the nineteenth century, based on texts by Goethe or inspired by his works. Among the manuscripts are an early sketch from Wagner's Faust Overture and a one-page fragment from Beethoven's Egmont Overture. Liszt, Mendelssohn, Ludwig Spohr, and Goethe's composer friend Karl Friedrich Zelter, among others, are represented by manuscripts. First editions of songs by Schubert and a copy of the "Leipziger Liederbuch" (a collection of songs published by Breitkopf in 1770 and said to contain the first appearance in print of a poem by Goethe) are highpoints of a large collection of printed songs, scores, operas, and libretti related to Goethe. Twentieth-century music has not yet been collected. This group of about one hundred letters from the papers of Karl Gottfried Theodor Winkler provides a portrait of intellectual life in the age of Goethe. Under the pseudonym Theodor Hell, Winkler edited important periodicals, such as the Dresden Abendzeitung, and was a prominent theater director, playwright, publisher, and translator. Most of the letters in the collection were written to Winkler, but there is also correspondence exchanged by Wieland, Lavater, and Eliza von der Recke, famous in her time for her part in the exposure of Cagliostro. These letters came to Yale in 1938 as the gift of Mrs. Alfred E. Hamill, a niece of Winkler's granddaughter. The Speck Collection includes several vertical files of material that varies widely in value and rarity. Pamphlets, mostly material about Goethe, are classed and cataloged as printed books. In addition there are files of illustrations, chiefly to works by Goethe; portraits of Goethe and his contemporaries; and views of places associated with Goethe. These files were built strictly as subject collections, and material of the most ephemeral character stands side by side with such items as Piranesi's views of Rome. Goethe's travels are documented by a small map collection. Playbills and programs relating to productions of Goethe's plays date from approximately 1850 to 1930. Files of Goethe postcards and of Goethe in advertising date primarily from the early decades of this century. Much of this material belonged to the Berg collection, 4,000 items purchased in Germany in 1928. The Speck Collection also contains a number of significant art works, such as the Oswald May portraits of Goethe and Wieland that hang in the Beinecke reading room, the Rauch bust of Goethe, a Lips engraving of the young Goethe, and an anonymous silhouette of the poet from 1786. While Schiller has not been collected as thoroughly as Goethe, all of his first editions are present, including rare early works such as Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782, Venuswagen (1781), Wirtembergisches Repertorium der Literatur (1782-83), and Schiller's dissertation, Versuch über den Zusammenhang der thierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen (1780). A curiosity of the Schiller collection is the pamphlet Die Avanturen des neuen Telemachs, oder Leben und Exsertionen Koerners, fourteen colored sketches by Schiller that poke fun at his friend Gottfried Körner. The manuscript dates from 1786. The German collection is strong, although not complete, in first editions of the Romantic period. There are, for instance, copies of Hölderlin's Hyperion (1797-99), Brentano's Godwi (1801-02), Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), Waiblinger's Phaeton (1823), of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen of the brothers Grimm, and of the pseudonymously published Nachtwachen von Bonaventura (1805), now attributed to August Klingemann. The library continues to add early nineteenth-century titles, such as Kleist's Käthchen von Heilbronn (1810) and Büchner's Danton's Tod (1835). Literary editions from the second half of the nineteenth century are to a large extent present in Sterling Memorial Library, the result of systematic purchase of German books begun at Yale during those decades. The basis of Yale's Heine collection, as well as a large portion of its holdings in Judaica, came from George Alexander Kohut. In 1915 Kohut gave to Yale his father's extensive library of Judaica, the Alexander Kohut Memorial Collection, and in 1933 he donated his own Heine collection, which he had recently augmented by purchasing the Heine library of the Munich dramatist Arthur Ernst Rutra. The collection includes nearly all the printed works of Heine and representative manuscripts. It is especially rich in French editions of Heine and includes a historically significant gathering of works by the oppositional German writers of the 1830s and 40s, with whom Heine is associated: Ludwig Börne, Theodor Mundt, Ludolf Wienbarg, Karl Gutzkow, and others. In 1957, Dr. Edgar Oppenheimer presented to the German Literature Collection a group of 186 volumes by and about Rainer Maria Rilke. Almost all of the first editions of Rilke's works are present, including rare early publications (Leben und Lieder, 1894; Larenopfer, 1896; and the three issues of Wegwarten, 1895-96) as well as later limited editions of works by Rilke. The Oppenheimer books are in mint condition and many of them have especially fine bindings. Purchased in 1947, the Kurt Wolff papers consist of approximately 4,100 letters and some manuscripts from the files of the Kurt Wolff Verlag from the years 1910-30. During those decades Wolff was one of the leading publishers of contemporary literature in Germany, and his correspondents included Expressionists (Benn, Heym, Toller, Trakl), Dadaists (Ball, Huelsenbeck, Tzara), and artists (Gauguin, Grosz, Klee, Kokoschka, Kollwitz, Kubin, Masereel) as well as such prominent literary figures as Hauptmann, Hesse, Kafka, Karl Kraus, Else Lasker-Schüler, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Rilke, and Wedekind. The longest files of correspondence are with Franz Werfel and Walter Hasenclever, a friend from Wolff's student days in Leipzig. In all, 178 correspondents are represented in the collection. (After fleeing Europe in 1940, Wolff established Pantheon Books in New York, but this phase of his career is not documented in the Yale papers.) Many of the letters at Yale were published by Bernhard Zeller and Ellen Otten in Briefwechsel eines Verlegers 1911-1963 (Frankfurt am Main, 1966). The Beinecke Library's Broch archive is the world's principal repository of his manuscripts and correspondence. Broch bequeathed his papers to Yale, and this core collection has been augmented since 1951 by gifts of manuscripts and letters from his family and friends. Virtually all of his books and essays are represented in manuscript form, and the collection includes unpublished fragments as well as juvenilia, chiefly of a philosophical and mathematical nature. There is extensive correspondence, both personal and business, supplemented by a number of biographical documents. Photographs of Broch have come from Broch's family and from the photographers Trude Geiringer and Trude Fleischmann. Broch's printed works (including representative translations) are supplemented by clippings and reviews that document Broch's reception to the present. Irma Rothstein's bust of Broch and Peter Lipman-Wulf's death mask of the author are also part of the archive. The inventory of the Broch archive that appeared in Modern Austrian Literature in 1972 is now much out of date. At the core of Thomas Mann holdings are nearly forty manuscripts given by Mann in 1938 for the purpose of establishing a collection. With the help and dedication of its advisor, the late Joseph W. Angell, the Mann collection grew to include 102 manuscript items, about 4 linear feet of correspondence and special files, and a large collection of printed materials by and about Mann. Outstanding manuscripts include "Notizen zu Goethe und Tolstoi," prepared for a lecture in 1921; the autograph manuscripts of Die Geschichten Jaakobs and Der junge Joseph; and 71 rejected leaves from the lost manuscript of Der Zauberberg. In addition to longer works, there are many essays, open letters, and speeches, for instance the autograph manuscript of the essay Dieser Friede, dated October 1938 from Princeton. The collection also includes the handwritten draft of Thomas Mann's reply to Karl Justus Obenauer, who in December 1936 revoked Mann's honorary doctorate from the University of Bonn, and a number of the Deutsche Hörer broadcasts in the form of typescripts corrected by the author. In 1957 Yale purchased the major portion of Helen Lowe-Porter's Thomas Mann papers, including typescripts of her translations of essays and lectures by Mann and her English renditions of all of five of his novels, often accompanied by German typescripts, which were prepared under Mann's supervision and have occasional manuscript corrections in his "Roman" hand. Among the longer Mann correspondences held at Yale are the letters with Joseph Angell between 1935 and 1951, the letters with Hermann J. Weigand between 1927 and 1952, and the correspondence with Helen Lowe-Porter, 1924-54. Erich Auerbach, Alfred Knopf, Llewelyn Powys, and Marguerite Yourcenar are represented by smaller groups of letters. The letters to Agnes Meyer, numbering over 300, offer indispensable information on Mann's years in the United States. Mann met Meyer on his 1937 lecture tour and she became one of his closest friends and most ardent supporters, offering him political advice and commentary on the American scene. The bulk of Meyer's letters to Mann have apparently not been preserved. The Mann/Meyer correspondence, edited by Hans R. Vaget, was published by Fischer Verlag in 1992. Nonprint materials in the Mann collection include Esther Vance's oil portrait of the author, done at Princeton. There are also several photographs of Mann, one of them by Edward Steichen, dated 1934. Clippings by and about Mann include material collected by Helen Lowe Porter and by James F. White. The Beinecke Library holds a nearly complete collection of printed works by Thomas Mann, many of them signed by the author.
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Comments:Ellen
R. Cordes, ellen.cordes@yale.edu |