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the book collector Anna Amalia including her Lieder für Klavier und Harfe, which sadly was badly damaged in the fire. The collection also includes various compositions by Sophie Westenholtz, who was well established as a pianist and composer from the 1780s across Germany. Dix-huit danses de different genre pour le Piano-Forte by Maria Szmanowska, the Polish composer who was also one of the first professional virtuoso pianists in the 19th century, is there in the Duchess’s collection as well as one of the works by Vittoria Aleotti (c. 1575 – after 1620), an Italian Augustinian nun, composer and organist. The Duchess was particularly interested in the new pedagogic developments and education methods – an edition of Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloise was part of her private library and inspired her own musical manuscript for Goethe’s Erwin und Elmire. Most extraordinary though was the library’s hand-written catalogue, which somehow survived the fire, for it lists an unusually high amount of literature written by women, on women and for women. Anna Amalia’s life changed once her son came of age. Only thirty- five years old at the time she could now embrace the things she enjoyed most – culture and science in every aspect – while leaving politics to her son. At last she had the opportunity to entertain more and, with Goethe’s arrival in Weimar in 1775, she started a theatre (in which she performed), organised concerts and even composed the score for Goethe’s Erwin und Elmire, which premiered at her court theatre in 1776. In 1781 she founded the periodical Tiefurter Journal to which she invited artists, poets, academics and politicians of both gender to contribute on politics and the arts, its tone being one of humour combined with knowledge. Getting people to write for it became part of her regular gatherings: forty-nine hand-written issues were produced in all. A few copies were made of every issue to be passed around after reading. Goethe, Herder and Wieland were among the authors as well as the Duchess and several of the female members of her circle, including Sophie von Schardt and Caroline Herder. Although the 2004 fire was a major setback, it was only three years before the library opened again. Once the recovery of books had finished, it became obvious that the majority had been seriously damaged, but they still possessed the individual characteristics that 124
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the duchess anna amalia library in weimar made them irreplaceable – their provenance. Their rapid recovery and their subsequent restoration by Weimar and the Centre of Book Maintenance in Leipzig effectively prevented subsequent damage such as deformation and adherence of the books’ covers as well as contamination by harmful substances. In Leipzig, for example, the 62,000 soaked books from the Rococo Hall were cleaned, frozen at -18°C and then carefully dried in a vacuum. But restoration is a young, interdisciplinary, specialised field and it was clear from the start that the library had to find innovative methods of mass restoration. Given its cultural importance, the library could count on cooperation from experts around the world. The result was a mainly European network, but reaching as far as Japan, that consisted of twenty-seven workshops besides other service operations, laboratories, universities and libraries. There were three main restoration categories: 37,000 books with covers damaged by fire and water; 25,000 book remnants that were recovered from the debris and 56,000 books and graphics that were contaminated by soot and smoke as well as wood protection agents and pesticides. The diversity of covers required very different restoration methods – leather covers went to a Swedish specialist; damaged parchment covers had a Japanese technique applied; others survived in different states – some of the 10,200 books with soft and hard covers made of coloured paper from the 17th to the 19th centuries only survived in fragments. The so-called 25,000 ‘ash books’ led to a new mass restoration technology, which was developed in 2008 at a workshop near Weimar. Superficially, the charred and seemingly unusable lumps of burned paper appeared beyond redemption, but their interiors were surprisingly intact. A newly developed compression-case helped preserve books whose covers had been damaged by heat and water. The number of remnants worth resuscitating is, with their 1.2 million sheets, twice the amount originally estimated and restoration work is ongoing. Even fifteen years after the inferno new works are being recovered – including the first edition of De Revolutionibus Orbum Coelestium by Copernicus. One of the surviving treasures is the Luther Bible from 1534. It had been on the first gallery in the Rococo Hall during the fire, but was rescued by the director of the library and is now 125

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the book collector

Anna Amalia including her Lieder für Klavier und Harfe, which sadly was badly damaged in the fire. The collection also includes various compositions by Sophie Westenholtz, who was well established as a pianist and composer from the 1780s across Germany. Dix-huit danses de different genre pour le Piano-Forte by Maria Szmanowska, the Polish composer who was also one of the first professional virtuoso pianists in the 19th century, is there in the Duchess’s collection as well as one of the works by Vittoria Aleotti (c. 1575 – after 1620), an Italian Augustinian nun, composer and organist.

The Duchess was particularly interested in the new pedagogic developments and education methods – an edition of Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloise was part of her private library and inspired her own musical manuscript for Goethe’s Erwin und Elmire. Most extraordinary though was the library’s hand-written catalogue, which somehow survived the fire, for it lists an unusually high amount of literature written by women, on women and for women.

Anna Amalia’s life changed once her son came of age. Only thirty- five years old at the time she could now embrace the things she enjoyed most – culture and science in every aspect – while leaving politics to her son. At last she had the opportunity to entertain more and, with Goethe’s arrival in Weimar in 1775, she started a theatre (in which she performed), organised concerts and even composed the score for Goethe’s Erwin und Elmire, which premiered at her court theatre in 1776.

In 1781 she founded the periodical Tiefurter Journal to which she invited artists, poets, academics and politicians of both gender to contribute on politics and the arts, its tone being one of humour combined with knowledge. Getting people to write for it became part of her regular gatherings: forty-nine hand-written issues were produced in all. A few copies were made of every issue to be passed around after reading. Goethe, Herder and Wieland were among the authors as well as the Duchess and several of the female members of her circle, including Sophie von Schardt and Caroline Herder.

Although the 2004 fire was a major setback, it was only three years before the library opened again. Once the recovery of books had finished, it became obvious that the majority had been seriously damaged, but they still possessed the individual characteristics that

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