German Literature

Kurrelmeyer Collection

Dr. William Kurrelmeyer, who spent almost all his academic career at Hopkins, was a philologist and textual critic. He edited several early volumes of the complete edition of Wieland's works, and in the course of this project he discovered many previously unknown variant printings which affect the text. His scholarly work was based on his own collection, which he left to the University in the 1950s. Its greatest strength is in the works of Wieland, with all important editions, but there are also notable groups of Goethe and Heine first editions, and many works of their lesser known contemporaries. As well as printed books, Dr. Kurrelmeyer collected manuscripts, especially letters of major writers, and several authors who are not so well known, such as Luise Mühlbach and Karl Gutzkow. This correspondence has great historic interest, especially for the history of German publishing.

 Collitz Collection

Dr. Hermann Collitz, who died in 1935, was also a long-time member of the Hopkins faculty, and a philologist and collector of German literature. His books, which supplement the Kurrelmeyer collection, include more than twenty different editions of Goethe's Faust and a particularly interesting group of versions of Reynard the Fox. Personal correspondence of the Collitz family, much of it dating from the First World War, is included in the collection, which was purchased after Mrs. Collitz's death by the Friends of the Libraries.

Loewenberg Collection

Another purchase by the Friends was the collection of contemporary German drama formed by Dr. Alfred Loewenberg in Germany before the Second World War. He sold it in 1937 before moving to England, where he published in 1942 the work for which he is best known, Annals of Opera. His German drama collection covers the period 1880 to 1934 and is nearly comprehensive, including translations of foreign works performed in Germany as well as plays by German authors. There are more than 3500 plays with examples of the most important styles: expressionism, naturalism and New Objectivity, among others.

In addition to the Loewenberg Collection, the Eisenhower collection includes holdings in theatrical works by major authors such as Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Lessing, in first and other early editions. Among the eighteenth-century collections of German plays are individually issued works by lesser known writers such as Johann Anton Leisewitz, whose Julius von Tarent (1776) was the original "Sturm und Drang" play. Works by later writers such as Karl Immermann and Franz Grillparzer are also part of this particular German drama collection. The German drama collection at the Peabody Library consists of about 200 volumes, including the forty volume set Theater von August Kotzebue (1804) and the twenty-six volume run of Gesammelte Dramatische Werke von Roderich Benedix (1872).