Fire that swallowed up the Anna Amalia library in Weimar ranked as the most devastating blow to German culture since the Second World War.

Three years after the blaze the Rococo library, which Germans view as a national icon in the manner of the Bodleian in Oxford University, was reopened yesterday after a restoration project costing ¤. The ceremony triggered a debate about the need to head off the threatened demise of libraries.

“Libraries have to be put back on the political agenda,” said President Köhler, as he opened the Anna Amalia to public view. “Only 15 per cent of our schools still have their own libraries, university libraries are struggling for funds for new acquisitions, we need urgent action on paper restoration and in many old libraries there are inadequate fire safeguards.”

The Anna Amalia burnt down in September 2004 because of sparks from a defective cable in the attic. Hundreds of thousands of ancient pages were propelled into the sky as one explosion followed another. The people of Weimar, the city that is closely associated with the national poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, formed a human chain to throw to safety precious works such as the original travel diaries of Alexander von Humboldt, the noted explorer.

Michael Knoche, the director of the library, rushed in and out of the blazing building grabbing what he could.

“Suddenly I remembered the 1534 Luther Bible with its colourful illustrations from the Cranach workshop,” the librarian said. The Bible, however, was on the second floor and the flames were already eating away at the upper storeys. He pleaded with a fireman to work his way through the smoke and managed to bundle up the two volumes of the Bible and a manuscript from 1522.

The blaze destroyed 50,000 books, including a 16th-century book by Nicolas Copernicus, the astronomer, valued at more than €1 million (£698,000) and the 200 volumes of the 18th-century Krünitz encyclopedia. “Among the losses were books that were unique to our cultural history,” Mr Knoche said.

The fire and the water that was used to douse the flames damaged 62,000 other books. A national appeal was launched and thousands of Germans have been chipping in to the ¤67 million fund needed to restore the manuscripts. So far 16,000 have been painstakingly rendered fit to read. For the past three years Germany has been using search teams to track down replacement books, only to find that most were irreplaceable.

The building of new libraries and protection of ancient collections such as the Anna Amalia became a priority after the Second World War. The memory was still fresh of how the Nazis had organised the looting of public and private libraries in 1933 and how they had made a bonfire of books written by Jewish or Marxist authors. The Allied bombings and firestorms destroyed other collections; in all 900,000 books were lost during the war.

The fire at the Anna Amalia, a World Heritage Site, hit the Germans hard because it had survived so much. Weimar castle burnt down in 1774. Fortunately Duchess Anna Amalia had moved the book collection to another palace only a few years before the blaze. The collection was duly named after her and it grew over the centuries, surviving many wars in Europe. By the time that fire struck again, in 2004, the library had grown to 200,000 books, paintings and a collection of music notation.

“This is a day of joy for Germany as a cultural nation,” President Köhler said at the reopening. But it was also a wake-up call for authorities who thought that the growing use of the internet had relieved them of the need to maintain libraries and literacy.

Fahrenheit 451

48BC
Julius Caesar set fire to the Egyptian fleet in Alexandria. The fire burnt down the library and 700,000 scrolls were destroyed

1915
German troops set fire to the University Library in Louvain, Belgium: 900 manuscripts and 230,000 books were lost, including 800 that predated the year 1500

1992
Bosnia’s National and University Library in Sarajevo was bombed by Serb forces and burnt to the ground

2003
The Iraqi National Library in Baghdad burnt down. Priceless Ottoman documents were lost, and the entire royal court records

Source: Times research

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