Welcome to the MedLibrary.org Wikipedia Supplement on Berlinka (art collection) -- Please Click to Return to Front Page

Facsimile of the Lied der Deutschen manuscript of 1841. The original is kept in Poland in the Berlinka

The Berlinka (Polish: from Berlin) Looted art is the Polish name for a German collection of historic material which was originally at the Preußischen Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Prussian State Library at Berlin (Berlin State Library), but is now kept in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków, Poland.

History

During the Second World War, German authorities moved the material to the Silesian Kloster Grüssau to protect it from Allied bombing. When Lower Silesia became Polish territory after the war, the Polish state secretly claimed the collection as war reparations.¹

The Polish government kept the Berlinka's existence a secret until 1977, when Polish First Secretary Edward Gierek gave East German leader Erich Honecker seven pieces of sheet music, including Mozart's original manuscript of "Zauberflöte" and Beethoven's notes for his Ninth Symphony², as a gift.

Poland claims that it should retain ownership of the Berlinka as compensation for Polish historical collections destroyed or looted by Germans during the Second World War; the total worth of Polish cultural heritage destroyed by Germany is estimated at 20 billion dollars.¹ The German media refers to the Berlinka as the "last German prisoner of war", and claims that Poland is in violation of the Hague Convention of 1907.³

Early 2006 Alan Kirkness, a New Zealand Germanist, who searched for fifteen years, discovered examples of the Grimmsche Woerterbuch with handwritten notes by the Grimm Brothers as part of the looted art taken from Germany at the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow.

In summer 2007, Der Spiegel quoted German foreign ministry representative Julia Gross as saying that negotiations over the disposition of the Berlinka had reached a low point. Earlier, Poland had stated that the return is out of the question.² Previously, Poland has undertaken several initiatives, such as proposing a creation of a Polish-German foundation that would take possession of such disputed collections, but Germany has refused, each time demanding that Poland return the Berlinka unconditionally; Poland refuses, claiming that Germany still has much Polish material looted during WWII, and that this should be returned to Poland in exchange.¹

Contents

The Berlinka is known to contain over 300,000 manuscripts by individuals such as Martin Luther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller. It also contains the original manuscript of the Deutschlandlied, Germany's national anthem¹, and linguistic studies by the Grimm Brothers. ⁴

See also

• looted art
• Nazi plunder

References

External links

• Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin website
• (Polish) Berlin, Berlinka i bierna Warszawa, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2007-08-11
• (Polish) Czy oddamy Bibliotekę Pruską? , Gazeta Wyborcza, 2001-09-12

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 15 November 2008, at 14:50.

Wikipedia Authorship and Review

Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.

Wikipedia Usage Guidelines

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Berlinka (art collection)".

The URL for this specific entry is:

• http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/Berlinka_(art_collection)

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.