Secondary looted goods from the Agnes Straub antiquarian bookstore in the Akademie der Künste Library

The aim of the project “Secondary looted goods from the Agnes Straub antiquarian bookstore in the Akademie der Künste Library” was to investigate the involvement of the Berlin-based Agnes Straub antiquarian bookstore in National Socialist book theft. The bookstore’s remaining stocks were transferred to the Academy Library in the early 1950s. This exemplary study was intended to shed light on the role of the antiquarian book trade in disseminating secondary looted property. Under third-party funding arrangements, Sandra Butte was the researcher for the project. Dr. Stefan Wiederkehr managed the project.

The research was conducted from two different starting points. Firstly, a thorough analysis was carried out of the files in the Academy archive that related to the takeover of the remaining stocks from the Agnes Straub antiquarian bookstore. The surviving catalogs from this bookstore were also analyzed in full. Secondly, an important lead was provided by the bookplate of a Jewish citizen which was found in books from the Agnes Straub antiquarian bookstore that had been incorporated into the Academy Library. The aim was to clarify the circumstances in which the owner had been deprived of this private library. Interim findings led to the research being expanded to other archives and establishments, namely the library and archive of the Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels in Frankfurt am Main, the Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv (BLHA) in Potsdam, the archive of the Federal Office for Central Services and Unresolved Property Issues (BADV) in Berlin, the Entschädigungsbehörde des Landesamtes für Bürger- und Ordnungsangelegenheiten (LABO) in Berlin, the Kreisarchiv Mansfeld-Südharz in Sangerhausen and the Landesarchiv Berlin.

The main features of the history of the Agnes Straub antiquarian bookstore and the gradual expropriation of the property of the Jewish citizen due to Nazi persecution can both be largely reconstructed based on the available files. However, the known sources provide no answer to the crucial question of how the private library owned by the Jewish citizen came to be in the Agnes Straub antiquarian bookstore. This result of the case study clearly demonstrates the importance of systematic research on the antiquarian book trade in the National Socialist era and its role in the dissemination of secondary Nazi-looted property in the post-war era.