Varieties of Vandalism

To everything there is a season . . . a time to break down, and a time to build up.

—Ecclesiastes 3:1, 5

The postman has delivered what must be the last volume of Bernhard Fabian's mammoth undertaking to survey collections of pre-1900 books in German libraries and of German books in European libraries outside the German-speaking area. ¹ It has been a remarkable achievement: not only has the general editor displayed outstanding managerial skills in marshaling his regional editors, who, in turn, have seen to it that their many contributors produced what was required in good time, he has shown great resilience in coping with the changing parameters of the enterprise. For when it was conceived, the Berlin Wall still stood (and would do so for another hundred years, we were assured by Erich Honecker) and Central Europe was still in thrall to the monolithic Soviet Union. The collapse of both, just over ten years ago, presented Fabian with a challenge undreamed of: to extend the coverage of the enterprise not only to libraries in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) but also to those in the Eastern bloc countries. The result is that we now have forty-four volumes covering almost every European library with German collections of significance. ("Almost" is perhaps an exaggeration, because even Professor Fabian's charms could not persuade the Swiss to collaborate; so far there is no coverage of French libraries, not even those of Paris or Strasbourg. And there are numerous other notable omissions from individual volumes—such as the Warburg Institute in London and several Oxford and Cambridge libraries—though these omissions are not for want of trying on Fabian's part.)

The (virtual) completion of this project, coinciding as it does with the end of the second millennium and also with the (putative) sixth centenary of the birth of Johann Gutenberg, the inventor of European printing, offers an opportunity to reflect on the rise and fall of libraries over the past centuries and the current state of the library world. Browsing through the brief histories of the hundreds of libraries described in Fabian's Handbuch (some fourteen hundred in the volumes covering Germany alone) makes one acutely aware of the vicissitudes of library collections, of what insurance companies call "acts of God"—fire, flood, and tempest—and even more so the acts of man—war, prejudice, terrorism, and other follies. But the gloomy scene is lightened here and there by remarkable instances of foresight, altruism, and philanthropy, without which, scholarship, and our cultural life generally, would be decidedly the poorer: the building-up of great collections by princes, prelates, and professors, whether for personal use and delectation or for the use and edification of posterity, or the gifting of libraries as acts of charity. A notable example of the latter, randomly chosen, is the generosity of Károly Somogyi (1811-88), canon at Estergom, who was largely responsible for the rebirth of intellectual life of Szeged in southern Hungary after the town had been largely destroyed when the River Tisza flooded on March 12, 1879. Somogyi presented the municipality with his valuable personal library of 43,701 volumes—covering all disciplines, and particularly rich in incunabula, eighteenth-century, and pre-1711 Hungarian books—intending that the collection should form the basis of a university (Handbuch, III.5.233). The magnanimity of his gift was officially recognized when the library was opened by Emperor Franz Joseph on October 16, 1883.

Yet what persists in the mind from perusing Fabian's volumes is above all the endless series of disasters that have befallen libraries over the centuries—it is a sorry saga of mischance and of barbarism and cultural philistinism, against which librarians and book-lovers have resiliently put up a valiant fight. If I focus here on the fate of books and libraries, this is of course not to ignore the horrendous fates of the millions of men and women who have suffered down the ages and continue to suffer...