Duchess Anna Amalia Library
Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek
Interesting facts
- Among manuscripts that happened to be outside the building on the night of the fire was a previously unknown 1713 aria by Johann Sebastian Bach, announced in 2005.
- The 2004 blaze was the worst library fire in Germany since the Second World War, probably started by a smouldering fault in an electrical cable.
- The fire broke out only weeks before much of the collection was due to move into new underground stacks built for 1.4 million books.
- Badly charred volumes became known as ash books: of roughly 7 million damaged pages, about 1.5 million were judged restorable, and around 1 million were restored by 2021.
- To save burned pages in bulk, the library's restoration workshop developed and patented a steel compression cassette, a method unique at the time.
- The library began in 1691 with just 1,400 books opened to readers, and grew to about 11,000 within thirty years.
- Under Goethe's supervision the holdings doubled to some 80,000 volumes, forcing the neighbouring town tower to be converted into book storage.
- Its Shakespeare collection of about 10,000 volumes grew from the Shakespeare volumes of the poet and translator Christoph Martin Wieland.
- Among the losses in the fire was a 1588 part-book by the composer Orlando di Lasso from the ducal music collection.
Why it is worth it
The Rococo Hall of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library is one of the great library interiors of Europe: an oval of wooden pillars and bookcases rising through three storeys, with two galleries of books above the floor and a painted ceiling at the top. It was created in the 1760s by the court architect August Friedrich Straßburger, who gutted an older building and inserted a continuous timber structure into a floor area of only about 21 by 11 metres. Twelve pillars carry the oval and the first gallery, and a walkway around them gives access to the shelves from every side. A colossal bust of Goethe by Pierre-Jean David d'Angers stands in the library.
The building is the Green Palace, a Renaissance residence built between 1562 and 1569 by the court builders Nikolaus Gromann and Erhard van Mehren, probably named for the green patina of its copper roof. The ducal library had been founded in 1691, when Duke Wilhelm Ernst opened his books to readers; in 1766 Duchess Anna Amalia, regent of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, moved it here, and in 1805, at Goethe's suggestion, the old town tower next door was joined to it as a book store. Goethe supervised the library for 35 years until his death in 1832 and made it one of the leading libraries in Germany. Today it holds around a million volumes centred on German literature and culture around 1800, including medieval manuscripts, incunabula, a 1534 Luther Bible and the largest collection in the world on the Faust theme.
On the evening of 2 September 2004 fire broke out in the roof. It was stopped at the second gallery of the Rococo Hall, but about 50,000 books and 35 paintings were destroyed and some 62,000 volumes damaged; around 28,000 books were carried out during the fire, many passed from hand to hand. By October 2007 the building had been restored, its ceiling painting recreated. The library is part of the Classical Weimar World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1998.
Weimar, a small city in Thuringia, was the centre of German classicism around 1800, when Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland all lived and worked here.
Getting there
The library stands on Platz der Demokratie in the centre of Weimar, about 1.5 km south of Weimar Hauptbahnhof. The nearest airport is Erfurt–Weimar (ERF), about 26 km away.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Krämerbrücke 21.2 km · bridge
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From the encyclopaedia
The Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany, houses a major collection of German literature and historical documents. In 1991, the tricentennial of its opening to the public, the Ducal Library was renamed for Duchess Anna Amalia. Today, the library is a public research library for literature and art history. The main focus is German literature from the Classical and the late Romantic eras. The ducal library was supplied, among others, by the bookseller Hoffmann from Weimar as well as with publications from France and Europe by the Strasbourg publishing house Bauer, Treuttel and Würtz. The library was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the Classical Weimar site because of its testimony to the global cultural importance of Weimar during the late 18th and early 19th centuries during the Weimar Classicism movement.
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