German-Jewish Libraries After the Holocaust

German-Jewish Libraries After the Holocaust illuminates the final years of the long history of Jewish communal and institutional libraries in Germany. These valuable depositories, with centuries of history, heritage, and culture within their collections, played a vital role in the intellectual life of German Jews before the Second World War. After the Nazis rose to power, they were plundered, dispersed, and largely destroyed. Only scattered fragments survived past 1945.

Drawing on an impressive variety of documents from archives in Germany, the Czech Republic, Israel, and the United States, author Anna Hołzer-Kawałko uncovers what happened to the remains of these lost libraries in the wake of the profound reconfiguration of Jewish life after the Holocaust. As the dynamics of the Cold War were crystallizing, efforts toward the restitution of Nazi-looted Jewish cultural assets may have preserved books in a material sense, yet their collective meaning as treasury of German-Jewish heritage and culture was never recovered.

None of the libraries described in this book exist today. German-Jewish Libraries After the Holocaust makes them visible once again, demonstrating that there is much to be learned from the very process of their vanishing.