Karlsruhe manuscripts selloff update

Followup on a proposed crime against culture of staggering proportions:

Germany's Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said on Monday he would make sure that the planned sales of a manuscript collection from the state library of Baden-Württemberg did not take place. . .

The southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg originally planned to sell around 3,600 manuscripts from its state library collection in Karlsruhe with the goal of raising around 70 million euros ($88.6 million) for financing the maintenance of Salem Castle and Abbey, a Gothic architectural gem which dates back to the 12th century.

But which is privately owned.

The planned sale of the Karlsruhe manuscript collection has been heavily criticized by historians, librarians and manuscript experts in Germany. The heads of prominent manuscript collections in Germany issued a statement on Monday in which they said they were "stunned" by the proposed sale of the collection.

From Deutsche Welle. From the article, however, it is not clear if Neumann is seeking to block the sale or merely to mitigate its impact slightly by imposing export restrictions or other conditions of sale (such as an obligation to make the manuscripts available for study or display). Certainly the latest news from Baden-Württemberg suggests that the outrage over the proposed selloff is having some impact, with the stated amount needed to be raised having been lowered from 70 million to 30 million Euros, with more conventional means of raising the funds now being explored. The manuscripts are by no means out of danger, however, and at least some of the fundraising schemes being proposed (e.g., asking each library and museum to consign an item for sale) demonstrate that the leaders of Baden-Württemberg are philistines without peer and without a clue. The notion that the preservation and renovation of a privately-owned cultural asset must be paid for with public funds is problematic enough; the insistence that those funds be taken from the cultural sphere, no matter what the damage done, is truly bizarre.

NOTE: I don't want to play down the complexity of the underlying issues regarding ownership of property nationalized in 1918 (and before), as part of the German states' transition from monarchy to democracy. Nonetheless, how far does one wish to go in returning national assets to former rulers, who now are private citizens? And especially cultural assets, that were collected when the ruling family was the government -- like most of the medieval manuscripts at the heart of this dispute, which were taken from suppressed monasteries. If a democratic revolution should be undone, why not the Reformation, or the suppression of monasteries under Napoleon? Perhaps the Vatican should make its own claim on the Karlsruhe manuscripts, and on the castle at Salem too -- a Cistercian monastery up until 1803.

ADDENDUM: Still next to nothing about this story outside of the German press, despite all the petitions and letters to the editor from scholars across the world. Let's see what happens now: I've just sent a synopsis of what's happening in Karlsruhe to various news outlets, including the BBC, the Guardian, the Times of London, and the New York Times.

Posted by David on October 12, 2006 11:11 AM