Old Library (Berlin)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
View of the old library from Bebelplatz , 2014

The Old Library (formerly Royal Library :, colloquially dresser is a) monument on Bebelplatz 2 in Berlin district of Mitte . It was planned by Georg Christian Unger on behalf of Frederick II as part of the Forum Fridericianum in 1774 and executed in the Baroque style by Georg Friedrich Boumann in 1775–1780 . Earlier plans by Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach for the Michaeler tract of the Vienna Hofburg served as the basis for Berlin's first independent library building . In World War II burned out, the old library was rebuilt by Werner Kötteritzsch outside historic and modern inside 1963-1969. Since then it has been home to the law faculty of the Humboldt University .

history

Old Unger Library in Berlin
Michaeler tract from Fischer von Erlach in Vienna
Photochromic print of the Royal Library (left) and the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Palais (right), around 1900

Frederick the Great , King of Prussia , placed the order for the construction as part of his Forum Fridericianum . The king wanted to make the literature of the Royal Library , which was previously reserved only for the nobility , ministers, scholars and higher civil servants, accessible to the bourgeoisie . According to his will, the Latin saying above the portal : “nutrimentum spiritus” ( German : “the spiritual nourishment”). This is said to have been freely translated by the Berliners as follows: " Spiritus is ooch 'n food".

The Old Library is very similar to the Michaeler tract of the Vienna Hofburg , as Frederick the Great had instructed his master builder Unger to use the designs by the Austrian master builder Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach , which were then 50 years old but not yet realized, for the Hofburg, which is published as copper engravings were. The result was a building that clearly differed in its formal language from all other buildings by Frederick II on the square, the Royal Court Opera , the Palais of Prince Heinrich and the Hedwig Church . In Vienna the plan, because they did not want to demolish a court theater, was only implemented in a slightly different form between 1889 and 1893. Thus, as a curiosity of history, the Berlin copy was completed more than a hundred years earlier than the Vienna original.

Adjustment was difficult, however. The Viennese design was drawn for a completely different urban environment, the building looked like a foreign body in the Berlin situation. With its curved facade - the Berliners spoke with a bit of amusement about the “ dresser ” - it could not be accommodated on the newly acquired property after all. Therefore the alignment line had to be moved a few meters forward, so the free space had to be a little smaller; at the same time, the inward curvature of the facade was significantly flatter than in the Austrian model.

There was no urgent need for the new library. The royal book collection was housed in the pharmacy wing of the Berlin City Palace, grew only slowly and found reasonable space there. The new library building, which was initially much too large for its purpose, can therefore also be seen as a demonstration of the patriarchal provisions, as a thoroughly contemporary step towards maintaining bourgeois culture and education. In 1784 the 150,000 volumes of the Royal Library of Berlin , founded in 1661 by Elector Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg as the Electoral Library of Cölln on the Spree , were relocated to the new building. The annual purchase budget was increased significantly to 8,000 Reichstaler, with additional funds being used to take over the holdings of entire libraries. The Royal Library collected the most important works of the Enlightenment , for example the writings of Kant , Leibniz , Diderot , Rousseau and Voltaire . At the beginning of the 19th century, the facility developed into the largest and most efficient library in the German-speaking area - in terms of inventory and use.

In the autumn of 1895 Lenin was also one of the library users; as a reminder of this, the GDR had named the corresponding room Lenin Reading Room (see picture).

The steadily growing number of books and magazines in 1905 comprised around 1.2 million volumes and therefore made another new building necessary after 120 years. In 1914, the library moved into the building at Unter den Linden 8, which was built according to plans by Ernst von Ihne , and from 1918 was called the Prussian State Library . After the library moved out in 1910, the building housed lecture halls as well as the auditorium of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, adorned with the monumental painting Arthur Kampf 's Fichte's Speech To the German Nation . Statues of Fichte and Savignys by Hugo Lederer flanked the portal. In the Second World War , bombs severely damaged the southern corner projections and in 1945 the house burned down to the surrounding walls.

Under the direction of Werner Kötteritzsch, the façade of the square was reconstructed between 1963 and 1969 , whereby the remaining emblems of the monarchy - eagles and crowns - were removed and, like Lederer's rector statues , were put in storage . The interior was rebuilt with reworked figures and wall decorations. Since its completion, the old library has served as the seat of the law faculty of Humboldt University. Since 1990, all works in the library have belonged to the successor institution, the Berlin State Library - Prussian Cultural Heritage (with ten million volumes, the largest universal library in Germany). For a better differentiation, the first building to be built has been called the Old Library since then .

literature

  • Elke Richter: The Royal Court Library in Berlin 1774-1970: A building between tradition and transformation , Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-7861-2847-2 .

Web links

Commons : Alte Bibliothek (Berlin)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b an undated excerpt from an East Berlin daily newspaper; probably 1980s

Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 59 ″  N , 13 ° 23 ′ 36 ″  E