Gerhard Alexander

Gerhard Alexander (born February 12, 1903 in Berlin , † September 7, 1988 in Hamburg ) was a German librarian .

education

Gerhard Alexander was a son of the chemist and manufacturer Walter Bismarck Alexander and his wife Hedwig, nee Grundmann. The family was originally of Jewish faith until Hedwig Grundmann suggested a Protestant baptism in 1914, probably due to the looming war. He began his school education at the Kaiserin-Augusta-Gymnasium in Charlottenburg . In 1919 the family moved to Hamburg, where he attended the Christianeum in Altona , which he left in 1921 with the final exam. Alexander studied German, English, Nordic, history and comparative linguistics at universities in Tübingen , Jena , Hamburg and Kiel . He finished his studies in 1927 with a doctorate on Old Norse verse theory in Berlin.

In 1928 Alexander passed the examination for the higher teaching post. Then he went to the university library of the University of Münster . Here he initially worked as a volunteer laborer. He completed a two-year advanced training course at the University of Berlin and received a position as a volunteer at the Münster library. In 1932 he married Margarethe Schnapp, whose father Friedrich Schnapp was a Protestant pastor in Dortmund . In the autumn of the same year, Alexander passed the academic librarianship examination at the Prussian State Library and received a position in the general catalog of the Prussian libraries. In 1933 he was fired because of his Jewish descent. When the Association of German Librarians warned in 1934 that the membership fee should be paid for 1934, Alexander responded with a letter of protest on May 11, 1934: he would not pay the fee and saw the reminder as "tactless", as the association did nothing against dismissals by Jews Librarians, said Alexander.

Alexander went back to Hamburg by necessity and worked as a commercial clerk at the "Deutsche Oelfabrik Dr. Grandel & Co. ”, in which his father held shares. In March 1938, the employment office instructed Alexander to work in the warehouse of the Rasch & Jung shoe wholesaler, which moved to Tostedt in 1943 . During this time Alexander did research on the prose of the Icelandic saga. In 1938 he tried unsuccessfully to leave the German Reich for America, where he wanted to work as a businessman. On February 13, 1945 the Hamburg employment office released him for “other work assignment”. One day later he was deported on the last transport to the Theresienstadt ghetto , where his parents were murdered in 1942 and 1943.

Reconstruction of the Hamburg university library

After the concentration camp had been liberated, Alexander returned to Hamburg in the summer of 1945 with severe health problems, where he recovered. He then worked, initially without pay, as an "unskilled worker" for the Hamburg State and University Library , which after its destruction in 1943 at Speersort was now temporarily located in the Wilhelm Gymnasium . Here, under difficult conditions, the employees examined and sorted books and files that had been collected from the ruins of the old library.

On September 1, 1946, Alexander received revocable civil servant status. The authorities accused him of having worked "outside the field" from 1933 to 1945 and of not having taken sufficient further training. After complicated negotiations, he was made a permanent official on June 13, 1952. During his time at the Hamburg library, Alexander successfully led the reconstruction of the North German Central Catalog, which under his aegis became important for the literary infrastructure. The employees collected evidence of the holdings of books and magazines in northern German libraries and established interlibrary loan.

In 1964 Alexander took over the management of the manuscript collection in the library. Together with his colleague Tilo Brandis , he was able to compile a so-called “yellow list” of manuscripts, incunabula and bequests that were stored in the “deposit” of the German State Library in East Berlin during the Cold War . These documents were outsourced during the Second World War, confiscated by the Soviet Union and later in parts returned to the GDR . The directory created by Alexander and Brandis in East Berlin provided a reliable overview of codices that belonged to Hamburg and were stored at various locations. On the basis of this document, an agreement was concluded on April 9, 1965, which made it possible to borrow the documents piece by piece and to preserve, catalog and film them in Hamburg. The State and University Library was thus able to participate in a cataloging program run by the German Research Foundation , which financed the work. The “yellow list” also made it easier for many researchers to research the literature.

Working in teaching and research

In addition to his work as a librarian, Alexander taught. Immediately after the end of the Second World War, he took over the management of training for the higher service. He also trained several generations of budding librarians at the library school. Since the winter semester of 1949/50 he taught and researched Nordic studies at the University of Hamburg. Ulrich Pretzel offered Alexander a position at the university, which Alexander refused.

In 1969 Alexander retired and did research. He created the first fully annotated edition of Hermann Samuel Reimarus' biblical criticism . The writings of the Hamburg scholar had previously been published only incompletely and anonymously by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and had led to the fragmentation dispute. Alexander's work, using Reimarus' handwriting, can be considered one of his greatest accomplishments.

Since 1974 Alexander has been a member of the Lessing Academy conferences . He spoke to the theology of the Enlightenment, to Judaism of the 18th century, to Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn . Since 1972 the librarian has been involved in the Reimarus Commission of the Joachim Jungius Society of Sciences .

literature

• Eva Horváth: Alexander, Gerhard . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 5 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0640-0 , p. 17-19 .