06 June 2025
Gnomes and Gardens
One of Germany’s great contributions to garden history, the Hortus Eystettensis, a magnificent 17th-century catalogue of the Bishop of Eichstätt’s garden, is on display in our current exhibition Unearthed: the Power of Gardening, in a splendid hand-coloured edition. Unfortunately, there was no room in the exhibition for another of Germany’s great contributions to garden history: the garden gnome (or garden dwarf, ‘Gartenzwerg’, as they are known in Germany). So I thought I would give the humble gnome a brief moment in the British Library sun.
For something often sneered at as ‘common’, the garden gnome has some surprisingly aristocratic forebears. In the 17th century noble families in German-speaking Europe began to decorate the gardens of their palaces with sculptures of caricatured dwarfs, based on the engravings of Jacques Callot; some of the most famous are in the Mirabell Palace Gardens in Salzburg. Both Callot’s engravings and the sculptures they inspired probably took inspiration from the ‘court dwarfs’ employed in European royal households as fools and curiosities in the 16th and 17th centuries.
One of the dwarf sculptures in the Mirabell Palace Gardens, Salzburg (photo: Susan Reed)
It was probably this sort of sculpture that Goethe was thinking of when he mentioned garden gnomes in his epic poem Hermann und Dorothea. In one section of the poem, a local apothecary laments the fact that his garden with its rustic wooden fences, grottos, gilded furnishings, and ‘stone beggars and colourful dwarfs’ has gone out of fashion, replaced in popularity by ‘tasteful’ smooth lawns and white benches. This suggests that by the late 18th century dwarf sculptures had become as much a bourgeois as an aristocratic trend and that, like garden gnomes today, they were increasingly seen as a sign of old-fashioned (and indeed bad) taste.
It’s not quite certain whether there’s a direct link between these baroque dwarfs and the red-capped gnomes we’re more familiar with today, but it’s certainly believable that the idea of comical miniature garden figures was inspired by the earlier fashion. The garden gnomes that started to be mass produced in Germany in the mid-19th century also had roots in northern European folklore, recalling the legendary creatures – sometimes benevolent, sometimes malign – that worked in the mines or as household spirits. The Romantic movement’s ‘rediscovery’ of folk and fairy tales no doubt influenced the desire to decorate houses and gardens with such folkloric figures.
Gnomes from Scandiavian folklore working in a mine and a stable, from Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus ... (Rome, 1555) 432.k.18.
It was the aristocracy again that played a part in bringing the gnome to Britain. Dwarfs were among the wooden carvings made in Switzerland and the Black Forest region which were popular as souvenirs with British travellers in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and when stone and plaster figures began to be made, they too were brought home. In 1847 the Victorian Baronet Sir Charles Isham built a rock garden in the grounds of his home which he populated with gnomes acquired from Nuremberg, and other wealthy landowners created similar displays. However, as if to prove that there is always a backlash to the popularity of gnomes, Isham’s daughters allegedly destroyed his collection after his death by shooting at them with air rifles.
Pages from a catalogue of gnomes and other figures offered for sale in the 19th century by the firm of Ludwig Möller in Erfurt (image from Wikimedia Commons)
Gnomes achieved wide popularity both in Germany and abroad in the later 19th century and a whole gnome-making industry grew up, especially in the Thuringian town of Gräfenroda. German gnome manufacturers, some of which survive to this day, issued catalogues of gnomes in all sorts of poses and carrying various tools and other accoutrements. Initially many held mining tools, reflecting the folkloric association with mines, but as the association with gardens developed these were often replaced by wheelbarrows, rakes and the like. After the First World War there was a slight dip in the popularity of gnomes among Germany’s wartime enemies, but this did not last, and gnomes were given a further boost after 1937 by Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
However, gnomes did slide down the social scale again, coming to be seen as examples of kitschy bad taste. With a few exceptions, they have famously been banned from the Chelsea Flower Show for most of its existence, and they are an easy literary symbol for small-minded suburbia. Ingeborg Wendt’s novel Die Gartenzwerge (Hamburg, [1960]; F10/0768), for example, is a story of small-town politics in which the hapless and compromised protagonist is a garden gnome manufacturer. Similarly, the stories in Jacques-Étienne Bovard’s collection Nains de Jardin (Yvonand, 1996; YA.1997.a.14873) satirise the complacency of bourgeois Swiss life, and the book’s blurb suggests that ‘the garden gnome is in each of us who carry it as a permanent attraction to all forms of mediocrity.’
A garden gnome in Brazil, from Orlando Azevedo, Jardim de anões (Curituba, 1992) YD.2023.a.386
Nonetheless, gnomes are still going strong, and since the late 20th century have increasingly been available in novel forms such as ‘rude’ gnomes (mooning, flashing etc.) and gnomes caricaturing politicians and other public figures. There’s even some cultural love for gnomes as evidenced by the museums, websites and festivals dedicated to them. Portuguese photographer Orlando Azevedo was so delighted to find them in gardens in southern Brazil, originally brought by Polish and German immigrants, that he made a project of photographing them. The gnomes get a chance to strike back in Norman Collins’s curious novel Little Nelson which depicts a Britain terrorised by a garden gnome revolt. And gnomes were awarded their own Google doodle in 2018.
Title page of Norman Collins, Little Nelson: a Tale for Adults and other Children (London, 1981; X.950/18826)
Finally, there’s the concept of the ‘travelling gnome’, where people take garden gnomes on their holidays and photograph them next to famous sights. This was popularised by the 2001 French film Amélie where the main character steals her father’s garden gnome and gets a flight attendant friend to take such pictures of it which she then sends to her father to encourage him to travel himself. Perhaps we’ll even see some travelling gnomes popping up at the British Library while Unearthed is still running!
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
References/further reading:
Baslilus Belser, Hortus Eystettensis, sive diligens et accurata omnium plantarum, florum, stirpium, ex variis orbis terræ partibus, singulari studio collectarum, quæ in celeberrimis viridariis arcem episcopalem ibidem cingentibus, hoc tempore conspiciuntur, delineatio et ad vivum repræsentatio ([Altdorf], 1613) 10.Tab.29.
Dieter Pesch, Zwerge, Hofzwerge, Gartenzwerge. Eine Genealogie des Gartenzwerges. Ausstellung im Niederrheinischen Freilichtmuseum, Grefrath, 2. September-28. Oktober 1973 (Grefrath-Dorenburg, 1973) X.0419/31.(1.)
Günther Bauer, Barocke Zwergenkarikaturen von Callot bis Chodowiecki (Salzburg, 1991) YA.1995.b.10647
Günther Bauer, Salzburger Barockzwerge: das barocke Zwergentheater des Fischer von Erlach im Mirabellgarten zu Salzburg (Salzburg, 1989) YA.1993.a.24163
Twigs Way, Garden Gnomes: a History (Oxford, 2009) YK.2011.a.18247
Martin Cornwall, The Complete Book of the Gnome (Basingstoke, 1987) LB.31.b.14936
Dieter Hanitzsch/Rolf Cyriax, Der wunderbare Gartenzwerg: eine notwendige Kulturgeschichte mit Bildern (Munich, 1981) L.42/1758
15 May 2025
Seminar on Textual Bibliography for Modern Foreign Languages
The annual Seminar on Textual Bibliography for Modern Foreign Languages will take place on Monday 9 June 2025 in the Foyle Room at the British Library in London. The programme is as follows:
11.00 Registration and coffee
11.30 Alyssa Steiner (London): Caught in the middle? Block books at the British Library
12.25 Lunch (own arrangements)
1.30 Jack Nunn (Oxford): Anthology making in an age of discovery: French maritime poetry in the print shop
2.15 Simone Lonati (Chichester): Public representation and interpretation of ‘monsters’. From the Monstrorum Historia to the dissemination of news during the English Civil War
3.00 Tea
3.30 John Goldfinch (London): Dr Rhodes, Dr Sloane and Dr Dee: a trail of catalogues and provenance
4.15 Yvonne Lewis (London): Languages for travel: John and Ralph Bankes in the 1640s and beyond
The seminar will end at 5.00 pm.
Attendance is free and all are welcome but please register in advance by contacting Barry Taylor ([email protected]) and Susan Reed ([email protected]) if you wish to attend.
Vignettte from Cornelio Desimoni, Nuovi studi sull’Atlante Luxoro (Genoa, 1869) 10003.w.4.
05 May 2025
Remembering Sacrifice, Celebrating Freedom
4 May – Dutch National Remembrance Day
On a small plot in the northern part of Mill Hill Cemetery around 60 people are gathered around the 254 graves of Dutch serviceman and women of the Dutch Armed Forces, the Dutch Merchant Navy, Dutch pilots who served in the RAF, and civilians who were killed during the Second World War in the UK. It is the evening of 4 May 2025, National Remembrance Day in the Netherlands. Leading the ceremony are an officer of the Dutch Army, the Dutch Ambassador and the Minister of the Dutch Church. This year the ceremony will mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. 80 years since VE Day is the theme this year.
80 jaar vrijheid: Nationale Herdenking 4 mei 2025 19.00 uur lokale tijd. (London, 2025). Awaiting shelfmark.
The Dutch remember and celebrate on two consecutive days, because remembrance and liberation are inextricably linked.
National Remembrance Day 4 May 2025 at Mill Hill Cemetery.
The oldest person present was one of three last survivors of the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück: Selma van de Perre-Velleman.
Selma van de Perre lays a wreath at the Dutch Field of Honour, Mill Hill Cemetery. Photo by Luke McKernan.
After the war Selma moved to London to join her two brothers David and Louis who too had survived the war. There she worked as a journalist and teacher and became active in the commemorations of Ravensbrück by visiting the camp with schoolchildren. She attends the Remembrance ceremonies at Mill Hill every year. In 2020 her memoir My Name Is Selma (2020) was published, both in Dutch and in English. The title refers to the fact she had to keep her real name secret and live under other names.
Selma van de Perre, Mijn Naam is Selma (Amsterdam, 2020) YF.2022.a.3688.
Selma van de Perre, My Name is Selma, translated by Alice Tetley-Paul and Anna Asbury. (London, , 2020). ELD.DS.548100
Younger generations are taking over from the older ones. As every year, pupils from the Dutch Regenboogschool in London wrote poems for Remembrance Day, and two of these were read out by the pupils themselves. The poems are also printed in the programme booklet.
5 May VE Day / Liberation Day
For the Dutch the 5th of May is not so much a Victory Day as a Liberation Day. The Netherlands had been occupied by Nazi Germany for five years and had suffered oppression, hardship, hunger, fear and death and had seen 75% of its Jewish citizens taken away to be be killed in concentration camps. The Dutch Indies has been occupied by the Japanese from 1941 until August 1945, where many suffered equally badly. So, when the German troops in the Netherlands, northwestern Germany and Denmark capitulated on 4 May to Field Marshal Montgomery, coming into force on 8 AM on 5 May, people were ecstatic. They came out into the streets, dressed in the national colours and orange and put up flags everywhere.
However, it was not until 8 May that Allied forces were given the green light by the High Command to proceed towards the big cities such as The Hague.
Canadian troops enter The Hague, surrounded by an almost delirious crowd, from J.G. Raadgever, Van Dollen Dinsdag tot de Bevrijding. (Amsterdam, 1945) X.700/2686
For three days people were held in limbo. They were not entirely certain whether the Germans had really capitulated, which was seized on by the latter to issue a notice that ‘rumours’ about a capitulation were false. Their police force also arrested journalists and newspaper editors who had emerged from years of clandestinely printing newspapers and were now issuing liberation editions of their papers. This dampened celebrations considerably.
Even after 5 May people were killed. During festivities on Dam Square on 7 May German soldiers who had retreated to the Groote Club at Dam Square, got into a fight with Dutch Internal Forces and started firing at the crowds. More than 30 people were killed. Exact details of what happened never became fully clear.
In Van Dollen Dinsdag tot de Bevrijding, (‘From Crazy Tuesday to the Liberation’) by J.G. Raatgever Jr. the author remembers how he shed tears watching the formations of Dutch fascists lining the streets like an ‘unmovable block of black reaction’, in May 1940 and how he again had tears in his eyes as he watched Canadian soldiers driving through the street as liberators in May 1945.
For the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in the Netherlands there is a packed programme of festivities throughout the country, with events on a national level organised by the Nationaal Comite 4 en 5 mei. [https://www.4en5mei.nl/ ] (There is an English language version).
Last night the ‘Bevrijdingsvuur’ (Liberation Fire) was lit in Wageningen, the city where the capitulation for The Netherlands was signed. From there the flame is taken to 14 places across the country to start the festivities. I remember the 5th of May 1970 when my father was part of a team of athletes who took the flame in a running relay from Nijmegen to Deventer, a distance of 60 Km.
Albert Kingma running with the Freedom Torch.
This year the traditional 4 and 5 May lectures are read by journalist and broadcaster Philip Freriks and by the Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk. The lectures are published together in one volume, demonstrating that remembrance and liberation are inextricably linked. They are also available online.
Marja Kingma, Curator Germanic Collections, Dutch Languages
20 March 2025
Learning - and Shouting out for - German over the Centuries
This week the German Embassy in London together with the German Academic Exchange Service and the Goethe Institut UK are running a ‘Shout out for German’ campaign, encouraging students, teachers and fans of German to show their love for the language and their experiences learning and using it. As a small contribution I decided to look at some of the many books in the BL that have been helping people to learn this splendid language over the centuries.
Title page of The High Dutch Minerva a-la-mode; or, a Perfect Grammar never extant before, whereby the. English may both easily and exactly learne the neatest dialect of the German mother-language used throughout all Europe (London, 1680)
The first true German textbook for English speakers was published anonymously in 1680 under the title The High-Dutch Minerva (‘High-Dutch’ was a common term for German at the time). The author, Martin Aedler, was clearly a big fan of his native German, describing it as the “most copious and significant, majestick and sweet, perfect and pure, easie and usefull, antient and universal toung.” Unfortunately potential learners seem not to have shared his enthusiasm and the publication of the book effectively bankrupted him. Nonetheless, the work was reissued in 1685 and its failure did not deter Heinrich Offelen from publishing his Double Grammar for Germans to learn English and English-Men to learn the German-Tongue in 1687.
Title page of A Double Grammar for Germans to learn English and English-Men to learn the German-Tongue ... (London, 1687) 628.b.12
However, it was not until the later 18th century that English speakers really started to take an interest in learning and reading German, leading to the publication of more grammars and dictionaries. John Uttiv, writing in the preface to his Complete Practical German Grammar in 1796, was clearly not impressed with these, claiming that his predecessors’ work was “for the most part incomplete, occasionally incorrect and scarcely in any way sufficiently practical to expediate and facilitate the acquisition of the language”. Users of the grammars could also be critical: in our copy of Johann Martin Minner’s English and German Dialogues, published in 1813, a reader has corrected some of the English translations provided.
Annotated page of Johann Martin Minner, English and German Dialogues Adapted to the Style of Polite and Elegant Conversation for Social Life =
Englisch-Deutsche Gespräche für das gesellschaftliche Leben (Frankfurt am Main, 1813) RB.23.a.39241
The 19th century saw a massive growth in interest in German and in publication of teaching and learning aids. The language started to find its way into school and university curricula and dedicated textbooks inevitably followed, as did annotated or bilingual editions of texts that enabled learners to experience German literature as they studied. Some of these used interlinear translations, the so-called ‘Hamiltonian system’, which had the potential to cause confusion given the differences of English and German word order, as in the opening of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell pictured below.
Page from L. Braunfels, A. C. White, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. The German Text, with an Interlinear Translation, Grammatical and Historical Notes, and an Introduction Containing the Elements of German Grammar, Second edition (London, 1859) 11746.c.40. Available online
Until the mid-20th century most German school textbooks had very straightforward titles along the lines of A Modern German Course, but in recent decades things have become a bit more upbeat and scattered with exclamation marks. Our catalogue lists cheery titles such as Alle Einsteigen! (‘All Aboard!’), Stimmt! (‘Right!’), Deutsch: Na Klar! (‘German: Sure!’) and the reassuring German with a Smile. These more modern works also focus less on the theory of grammar and more on the spoken language, often enhanced by audio or online exercises.
A selection of German textbooks from the 1960s to the 2010s
Changes in the way the language is introduced is illustrated by two books aimed at younger learners, Little German Folk from 1904 and Bringing German to Life from 2015. Both begin by introducing a German family, but in very different ways. Little German Folk presents a picture of traditional nuclear family (oddly dressed in quasi-renaissance clothing) and describes them in the third person. In Bringing German to Life two children, Anna and Alex, illustrated in a more cartoonish style, introduce themselves and their family in a dialogue, and we learn that they live with their mother and grandfather (and Max the dog). Anna and Alex accompany the learner throughout the book, but the family in Little German Folk more or less disappear after the first page. Bringing German to Life also has ideas for craft projects and activities to make learning more appealing.
Above: Meet the family from Margareta Schramm, Little German Folk: a First Book for Little Children Written in the Everyday Speech of Little German Children (Shaldon, 1904) 012808.m.50. Below: Meet the family from Catherine Watts, Hilary Phillips, Bringing German to Life: Creative Activities for 5-11 (London, 2015) YKL.2015.b.932.
The British Library’s collections also illustrate how German has been – and remains – an important language for many professions and academic disciplines. We have specialised textbooks for builders, businesspeople, musicians, singers, and art historians among others – not to mention librarians!
A selection of German textbooks and readers for specific professions
There are also books from both world wars intended to help British and American soldiers to understand German in general and military terminology in particular. After the Second World War, US diplomats could turn to the German Basic Course created by the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute in the 1960s, part of which was donated to the Library in 2017.
Page from F.W. Zimmermann, An Easy Handbook of German for Soldiers, containing the chief grammatical rules, conversational phrases, essays on military and technical subjects, and a handy vocabulary (London, 1914) 12963.aaa.48.
All in all, the British Library has pretty much everything you could want to help you learn German, or to study how German has been learned over the past three and a half centuries. And once you’ve learned your German, our German-language collections on pretty much all topics under the sun are yours to explore. You can’t shout out in our reading rooms of course, but I hope I’ve inspired you to join me in shouting out for German this week!
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
References/Further reading:
John Uttiv, A complete practical German grammar, according to the best German grammarians, containing true, plain, and easy instructions for acquiring fondamentally [sic.] and expeditiously a clear knowledge of the language, both in speaking and writing (Göttingen, 1796) RB.23.a.39233.
Günter Wallnig, Harry Evered, Deutsch für Baufachleute = German for Building Specialists (Wiesbaden, 1979) X.622/11769
Doris Fulda Merrifield, Deutsche Wirtschaftssprache für Amerikaner (New York, 1989) YC.1990.b.1966
Josephine Barber, German for Musicians (London, 1985) X.439/13542
William Odom, German for Singers: a Textbook of Diction and Phonetics (New York, 1981) X.950/9336
Mary L. Apelt, Hans-Peter Apelt, Reading Knowledge in German: a Course for Art Historians and Archaeologists = ein englisch-deutscher Lesekurs für Kunstgeschichte und Archäologie (Berlin, 1984) 84/20490
George W. Turner, Axel J. A. Vieregg, J. W. Blackwood, German for Librarians (Palmerston North, 1972) 2719.x.14068
Erich Funke, Meno Spann, Fred Fehling, Kriegsdeutsch: Easy Texts in Military German for Speaking and Reading (London, 1943) 8339.aa.7.
Samuel A. Brown, William R. van Buskirk, German Basic Course, Units 13-24 (Guilford CT, 1965). YD.2019b.360
Nicola McLelland, German Through English Eyes: a History of Language Teaching and Learning in Britain, 1500-2000 (Wiesbaden, 2015) YD.2015.a.2313
06 March 2025
Lidwina van Schiedam: Patron Saint of Ice Skaters and Chronic Illness
Our exhibition Medieval Women, in their own words, closed last weekend after a highly successful run (you can still find information about the topic and view some exhibition highlights here. Something that is also drawing to a close is the 2024-25 ice skating season.
What do these two things have in common? Well, one of the many ‘Spotlights’ in the exhibition was dedicated to Lidwina van Schiedam, patron saint of ice skaters and chronic pain. That too, is a peculiar combination, to say the least. Let me explain.
Lidwina (or Liduina, or Lidewy) van Schiedam is the most famous Dutch saint. Born in Schiedam in 1380, she lived there all her remarkable life until her death in 1433. When her father wanted to marry her off at the tender age of twelve, both Lidwina and her mother resisted. Lidwina even prayed to God to send her an illness that would make her unattractive to suitors. Whether you believe in divine intervention or not, her wish came true. In the winter of 1395, she was out ice skating with friends when she fell and broke a rib.
Lidwina falls on the ice, from Johannes Brugman,Vita Sanctae Lidwinae (1498). IA.48805 (as displayed in the Medieval Women exhibition)
The fracture resulted in an abscess which did not heal and she became increasingly ill. Eventually she became completely bedridden because of her pain. The pain also prevented her from eating and sleeping. She tolerated very little food, and legend has it that she survived on the Host alone. In modern literature this is sometimes referred to as ‘holy anorexia’. Initially, she resented her illness and pains but over time she came to accept them. She used her illness to develop her spiritualism and became a mystic and a healer. She reported having visions and out of body experiences. Following an investigation into her ‘eucharistic vision’, involving Christ taking the form of a host with five wounds hovering above her knees, the Bishop of Utrecht ruled in favour of Lidwina’s account and the veneration of Lidwina increased. She became known outside the bishopric of Utrecht and people flocked to Schiedam to see her for themselves and to seek healing.
The suffering Lidwina’s vision of Christ, from Johannes Brugman, Vita Sanctae Lidwinae
Lidwina died in Holy Week in 1433. A year later the Schiedam council built a chapel over her grave. In addition, attempts were made to canonise her, but the lengthy process was stalled by the Reformation, during which her chapel and grave were destroyed. Some of her relics were saved and after some travels they are now resting in the Liduina Basilica in Schiedam.
In the 15th century four lives of Lidwina were written. The oldest dates from 1434-1436, by Hugo van Rugge, a canon from the St.-Elisabeth monastery in Brielle. Around 1448 Thomas à Kempis wrote his Vita Lidewigis virginis using Rugge’s work. In 1470 the only title written in Middle Dutch appeared. Long believed to have been written by Jan Gerlachsz, a relative of Lidwina, it is now thought not to be by him, although no alternative author has been suggested.
The Institute for Dutch History’s Digitale Vrouwen Nederland database has an entry for Lidwina which mentions a document issued by the City Council of Schiedam on 21 July 1421. By that time Lidwina had been ill for 23 years and the Council had kept a record of her health in great detail. For instance, it lists what she drank in a week: one pint of wine, diluted with water, with sugar and some cinnamon. The original document is lost, but the text was copied by Johannes Brugman in his Vita Sanctae Lidwinae, from 1498 and so it survived. Brugman was a Dutch Franciscan travelling preacher, famous for his rhetorical skills. The phrase ‘To talk like Brugman’ has become an idiom in the Dutch language.
Johannes Brugman preaching, etching by Barent de Bakker, after a drawing by Hermanus Petrus Schouten (1782). Image from Wikimedia Commons.
In the 19th and 20th centuries interest in Lidwina grew. The works by Thomas à Kempis and Johannes Brugman were newly translated with commentary. In 1994 Ludo Jongen and Cees Schotel re-issued a translation and photographic reprint of the Middle-Dutch Vita prior, entitled Het Leven van Liedewij, de maagd van Schiedam.
Cover of Ludo Jongen and Cees Schotel, Het Leven van Liedewij, de maagd van Schiedam (Hilversum, 1994). ZA.9.a.5895(2)
In 2014 Uitgeverij Verloren published a volume containing two separate works: Een bovenaardse vrouw: zes eeuwen verering van Liduina van Schiedam (‘A supernal woman: six centuries of reverence of Liduina van Schiedam’) by Charles Caspers, and a new translation of Thomas a Kempis’ Vita, entitled Het leven van de maagd Liduina (‘The life of the virgin Liduina’).
Charles Caspers, Een bovenaardse vrouw: Zes eeuwen verering van Liduina van Schiedam. (Hilversum, 2014) YF.2015.a.25455.
Koen Goudriaan linked Lidwina to the Brethren of the Common Life, starting from the new insight that the oldest surviving Vita was not written by Brugman, but by Hugo Rugge, who was connected to the Brethern and that places Lidwina in that tradition. (ZA.9.a.10168)
And what about skating? That is nearly at an end. The last major competition in the 2024-25 season will be World Championship Distances in Hamar, Norway, from 13-16 March. Dutch skaters are at the top of the boards, having honed their skills for at least two centuries, looking from the painting of a women’s speed skating race in 1809.
Skating Race for Women on the city canal of Leeuwarden, 21 January 1809, by Nicolaas Bauer. Image from the website of the Rijksmuseum.
Jaap Eden was the first official world champion and over the last twenty years the Dutch have dominated the skating scene. I wonder whether Lidwina is lending a hand.
Hand-coloured photograph of Jaap Eden. Image from Wikimedia Commons
Marja Kingma, Curator Germanic Collections
References/Further reading:
Johannes Brugman, Vita alme virginis Lidwine, ed. A. de Meijer (Groningen 1963) Ac.936.k/3.
‘Vita prior’ ed. Daniël Papebrochius in: Acta sanctorum Aprilis II (Antwerp, 1675) pp. 270-302
Thomas à Kempis, Vita Lidiwigis virginis, ed. Michael Johannes Pohl. Opera omnia vol. 6 (Freiburg, 1905) pp. 315-453. 3706.aa.6.
Thomas à Kempis, Het leven van de heilige maagd Liduina, translated by Rijcklof Hofman (Hilversum, 2014) YF.2015.a.25455.
Koen Goudriaan, ‘Het Leven van Liduina en de moderne devotie’, in: Jaarboek voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis (2003) 6, pp. 161-236. ZA.9.a.10168.
Ludo Jongen and Cees Schotel, Leven van Liedewij, een Middelnederlandse vertaling van de Vita prior, waarschijnlijk eerst rond 1470 vervaardigd (Hilversum 1994) ZA.9.a.5895(2). Also available online.
Ludo Jongen, ‘Uit het oog, uit het hart? Over twee heilige maagden: Lutgard en Lidewij’, in: Gouden legenden: Heiligenlevens en heiligenverering in de Nederlanden, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Marijke Carasso-Kok (Hilversum 1997), pp. 127-137. YA.1998.a.6022
Ludo Jongen, Heiligenlevens in Nederland en Vlaanderen (Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 46-53.
J.B.W.M. Möller, Sint Liduina van Schiedam: in de mystiek en in haar tijd (The Hague, 1948) 4823.h.6.
‘Afschrift, gedateerd 1451, van de Schiedamse oorkonde van 21 juli 1421 met een vidimus van Jan van Beieren’, in: H. van Oerle, ‘Tleven van Liedwy die maghet van Scyedam’, Ons geestelijk erf 54 (1980) 3, pp. 241-266. P.101/476
Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland (Huygens Instituut, Amsterdam)
19 February 2025
For the Love of Books: European Collections at the British Library Doctoral Open Days
On February 14, European Collections featured at Doctoral Open Day themed ‘Global Languages, Cultures and Societies’. Marja Kingma, Curator of Germanic Collections, delivered a presentation introducing PhD students from across the UK and beyond to navigating the collections and identifying resources to support their research. In the afternoon, our curators hosted a show-and-tell session, offering the students a glimpse into the Library's unmatched holdings from continental Europe. The selections ranged from a quirky bottle-shaped Czech book to a Russian glossy LGBT magazine and a modern illuminated manuscript from Georgia. Spoiler alert – love-themed curatorial picks proved crowd pleasers. For those who could not make it, here is a taster of what you might have missed.
Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator of Slavonic and East European Collections, Olga Topol and Hanna Dettlaff-Kuznicka, Curators of Slavonic and East European Collections, turned the spotlight on minority languages and cultures, giving voice to the Evenks, Sakha, Kashubians, Silesians, and the Gagauz people of Ukraine. It was a revelation to many of the students to learn that Eastern Europe was both linguistically and culturally diverse, with a plethora of languages, ethnicities, and religious traditions across the region.
V. A. Dʹiachenko, N. V. Ermolova, Evenki i iakuty iuga Dalʹnego Vostoka, XVII-XX vv. (St. Petersburg, 1994) YA.1997.a.2298.
Marcin Melon, Kōmisorz Hanusik: we tajnyj sużbie ślonskij nacyje (Kotōrz Mały, 2015) YF.2017.a.20547. An interesting example of a crime comedy written in the Silesian ethnolect.
Milan Grba, Lead Curator of South-East European Collections, highlighted a groundbreaking work by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (‘Serbian Dictionary’), which proved very popular among researchers with an interest in linguistics.
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (Vienna, 1818) 12976.r.6.
It was the first book printed in Karadžić’s reformed 30-character Cyrillic alphabet, following the phonetic principle of "write as you speak." The dictionary contained over 26,000 words and was trilingual, with Serbian, German, and Latin entries. It standardised Serbian orthography but also preserved the nation’s oral tradition. The dictionary’s encyclopaedic entries encompassed folklore, history, and ethnography, making it a pivotal text in both linguistic reform and cultural preservation.
Anna Chelidze, Curator of Georgian Collections, showed the students a contemporary illuminated manuscript created in 2018 by the Georgian calligrapher Giorgi Sisauri. The Art Palace of Georgia commissioned the work especially for the British Library to enrich our Georgian collections. The poem Kebai da Didebai Kartulisa Enisa ('Praise and Exaltation of the Georgian Language') was written in the 10th century by John Zosimus, a Georgian Christian monk and religious writer. It is renowned for its profound reverence for the Georgian language, employing numerological symbolism and biblical allusions to underscore its sacredness.
(Giorgi Sisauri), John Zosimus, Kebai da Didebai Kartulisa Enisa, (2018) Or. 17158
Sophie Defrance, Valentina Mirabella and Barry Taylor, Curators of Romance Language Collections, treated the students to some ... romance.
Sophie Defrance took a tongue-in-cheek approach to the theme by suggesting another way to look at (some) love letters with Le rire des épistoliers.
Cover of Charrier-Vozel, Marianne, Le rire des épistoliers: XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Rennes, 2021) YF.2022.a.9956
The volume gathers the proceedings of a 2017 conference at the University of Brest on the expression, manners, and importance of laughing and laughter in 16th- and 17th-century correspondence, with examples from Diderot’s letters to his lover Sophie Volland, or from the exchanges between Benjamin Constant and his confidante Julie Talma.
Valentina Mirabella decided to revisit the Boris Pasternak’s timeless love story ‘Doctor Zhivago’. Turns out, the history of the novel’s publication in Italy was nearly as turbulent as the story itself! It was first published in Italian translation as Il dottor Živago in 1957 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Although an active communist, Feltrinelli smuggled the manuscript out of the USSR and resisted pressure against its publication. The demand for Il dottor Živago was so great that Feltrinelli was able to license translation rights into 18 different languages well in advance of the novel's publication. The Communist Party of Italy expelled the publisher from its ranks in retaliation for his role in the release of the book they felt was critical of communism.
Cover of the 34th (in the space of just two years!) edition of Il dottor Živago by Boris Pasternak translated from Russian by Pietro Zveteremich (Milano : Feltrinelli, 1959) W16/9272
Barry Taylor drew attention to the epistolary relationship and an electric bond between the Spanish author Elena Fortún (1886-1952) and the Argentine professor Inés Field (1897-1994) with the book Sabes quién soy: cartas a Inés Field (‘You know who I am: letters to Inés Field’).
Elena Fortún, Sabes quién soy: cartas a Inés Field (Seville, 2020) YF.2021.a.15259
Fortún was the author of the popular Celia books, which followed the heroine from a seven-year-old in well-to-do Madrid to a schoolteacher in Latin America. The books give a child’s-eye-view of the world. They were censored by Franco and the author was exiled, but the books have been re-published by Renacimiento of Seville in the 2000s. Fortún’s novel Oculto sendero (‘The hidden path’) published in 2016 is seen as a lesbian Bildungsroman.
Fortún met Inés Field in Buenos Aires. Now that both women are dead, critics feel free to read the correspondence through the prism of the Bildungsroman.
Ildi Wolner, Curator of East and South-East European Collections, explored the representations of love in art with Agnes’s Hay Sex : 40 rajz = 40 drawings.
Agnes Hay, Sex: 40 rajz = 40 drawings ([Budapest, 1979]) YA.1997.a.2586
Ágnes Háy is a Hungarian graphic artist and animation filmmaker, who has lived in London since 1985. Her unique experimental style of drawing uses simple lines and symbols to convey complex meanings and associations, and this booklet is no exception. Considered rather bold in Communist Hungary at the end of the 1970s, this series of sketches explores the diverse intricacies of gender relations, without the need for a single word of explanation.
Page from Sex : 40 rajz = 40 drawings [Budapest, 1979] YA.1997.a.2586
Susan Reed, Curator of Germanic Collections, shared a fascinating collection of essays examining aspects of the love letter as a social and cultural phenomenon from the 18th century to the present day.
Cover of Der Liebesbrief: Schriftkultur und Medienwechsel vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, herausgegeben von Renate Stauf, Annette Simonis, Jörg Paulus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008) YF.2010.a.14652
The authors scrutinised letters from historical and literary figures including Otto von Bismark, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rainer Maria Rilke. The book ends with a consideration of how online messaging forms might transform the way we write love letters.
Ela Kucharska-Beard, Curator of Baltic Collections, displayed a mysterious metal box containing a booklet in English and Lithuanian, some photographs, posters and letters.
Vilma Samulionytė, Liebe Oma, Guten Tag, or The Pact of Silence (Vilnius, 2018) RF.2019.a.120
Liebe Oma, Guten Tag, or The Pact of Silence is a moving tribute from the Lithuanian photographer Vilma Samulionyė to her grandmother, a Lithuanian German Elė Finkytė Šnipaitienė. When Vilma’s grandmother took her own life in her 70s, Vilma and her sister Jūrate decided to delve into the family history. Their research resulted in a documentary film, an exhibition, and an artists’ book. Along the way the sisters face taboos, one of them being a chain of suicides in the family.
The journey into the family’s German history and their post-war life in Lithuania left them with some unsettling questions. Who was Kazimieras and was he the reason why Ella Fink left her family behind? Throughout the story letters and photographs create a link between the family in the West and in the East, between the living and the dead.
We hope you have enjoyed this virtual show-and-tell of highlights in our European collections. We look forward to welcoming you to the next Doctoral Open Days in 2026!
11 February 2025
Medieval Women at the Press
One of the exhibits in our current exhibition Medieval Women: in their own Words is the first European printed book ascribed to a female printer. The printer in question is Estellina Conat, who worked with her husband Abraham printing Hebrew books in Mantua in the 1470s. The book is an edition of a 14th-century poem by Jedaiah ben Abraham Bedersi entitled Behinat ha-‘Olam (‘The Contemplation of the World’). It was printed around 1476 and in the colophon, Estellina states: “I, Estellina, the wife of my worthy husband Abraham Conat, printed this book”. (In fact she says she “wrote” the book since the Hebrew language had not yet settled on a word for the relatively new technology of printing.) She adds that she was assisted by Jacob Levi, a young man from Tarrascon in Provence.
Final page of Behinat ha-‘Olam (Mantua, ca 1476) C.50.a.5. (ISTC ij00218520) The colophon at the foot of the page names Estellina Conat as its printer
No other book from the Conat press survives with Estellina’s name in the colophon, and she has often been overlooked as the first woman printer in Europe, perhaps because she printed in Hebrew rather than in classical Latin or Greek or the contemporary European vernaculars more familiar to western scholars of early printing. Many sources still give the name of Anna Rügerin as the first woman printer instead.
Anna is named in the colophons of two books printed in Augsburg in 1484 (around 8 years after Estellina’s work!). She was part of a family of printers: her widowed mother had married the printer Johann Bämler, and Anna’s brother Johann Schönsperger, perhaps encouraged by Bämler, set up a press with Anna’s husband Thomas. After Thomas died, Anna appears to have taken over from him and printed in her own name editions of the historic German law book, the Sachsenspiegel and of a handbook for writers of legal and official documents entitled Formulare und deutsch rhetorica (Augsburg, 1484; IB.6605; ISTC if00245500).
Colophon naming Anna Rügerin as the printer of an edition of the Sachsenspiegel (Augsburg, 1484) IB.6602 (ISTC 00024000). Image from Wikimedia Commons, from a copy in the Bavarian State Library.
Another woman printer emerged in the 1490s in Stockholm. Anna Fabri, like Anna Rügerin, took over the work of printing on the death of her husband, a common pattern for female printers in the early centuries of the industry. In 1496 she put her name to the colophon of a Breviary for the diocese of Uppsala. Here she explicitly states that she completed the work begun by her husband. As in the case of Estellina Conat, no other book survives bearing her name.
Final Page of Breviarium Upsalense (Stockholm, 1496; ISTC ib01187000), naming Anna Fabri in the colophon. Image from a copy in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris. The British Library holds a single leaf inserted in a copy of G.F. Klemming, Sveriges äldre liturgiska literatur (Stockholm, 1879) C.18.c.13.
We don’t know exactly what role Estellina and the two Annas played in the production of the books that bear their names, but it’s certainly possible that it was more than merely overseeing the work and that they were involved in the physical processes of the print shop. We know that nuns of the Florentine convent of San Jacopo in Ripoli worked as typesetters in the printing house associated with the church and its Dominican community, and a Bridgettine abbey at Vadstena in Sweden printed a Book of Hours in 1495, although their press apparently burned down soon after and was not restarted. The current BL exhibition also features woodcut prints made and coloured by another Bridgettine community at Mariënwater in the Netherlands. All this work carried on the long tradition of medieval nuns working as scribes, artists and illuminators (also richly evidenced in the exhibition), bringing it into the new age of printing.
A leaf from a music book for use in the Latin Mass, illuminated by nuns of the Poor Clares convent in Cologne in the late 14th or early 15th century. Add MS 35069
The 18th-century scholar of early Hebrew printing, Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi, criticised Estellina Conat’s edition of the Beh.inat ha-‘Olam as unevenly printed, and scornfully suggested that it might be “the effort of a woman attempting something beyond her powers.” But as Estellina and her sister-printers show, printing was indeed within the power of women and they played a part in it from the early decades of the industry. Thanks to ongoing research, and publicity such as the Medieval Women exhibition, these woman printers and their work are ever more visible today.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
References/Further reading
Adri K. Offenberg, ‘The Chronology of Hebrew Printing at Mantua in the Fifteenth Century: A Re-examination’ The Library, 6th series, 16 (1994) pp. 298-315. RAR 010
Hanna Gentili, ‘Estellina Conat, Early Hebrew Printer’, in Medieval Women: Voices & Visions, edited by Eleanor Jackson and Julian Harrison (London, 2024) [Not yet catalogued]
Sheila Edmunds, ‘Anna Rügerin Revealed’, Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History 2 (1999) pp. 179-181. 2708.h.850
Anabel Thomas, ‘Dominican Marginalia: the Late Fifteenth-Century Printing Press of San Jacopo di Ripoli in Florence’, in At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy, edited by Stephen J. Milner (Minneapolis, 2005), pp. 192-216. YC.2005.a.12149
27 January 2025
A Balm on so many Wounds: Etty Hillesum’s Diaries 1941-1943
Etty Hillesum in 1939 (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
This year to mark Holocaust Memorial Day we have been looking at diaries and other autobiographical documents. As my colleague Olga Topol writes in her blog post, “The diaries of these individuals are not merely archival records; they are powerful reminders of the human capacity for resilience and creativity in the face of adversity.”
One remarkable example of that resilience are the diaries written by Etty Hillesum in Amsterdam. She acknowledges the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but manages to rise above them and does not let the horror dominate her writings. She records the growing evidence of “the interrupted life” around her. She writes it all down, starting on 9 March 1941 and ending on 10 October 1942 with the wish “One should like to be a balm on many wounds.”
She writes very openly about love, sexuality, about her struggle to find God, to root out hatred, including hate towards Germans. More than anything else she wants to serve others. She gets a job at the Jewish Council helping Jewish citizens navigate the laws imposed on them by the German authorities. When the deportations of Jews to the Westerbork transit camp started, she volunteered to accompany them.
Jewish citizens of Amsterdam obey the order they received in the post to come to the Olympiaplein in Amsterdam South to be transported to Westerbork. Image from an edition of Het Verstoorde Leven: Dagboek van Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943 (Bussum, 1983) Blog post author's own copy
Jewish people were told they were going to work in Germany, so many went. Those who didn’t were either taken from their homes or had to go in hiding. Many people did not have the means to hide, and Etty felt she could not abandon them, so she voluntarily went to Westerbork, out of solidarity.
Aerial photo of Westerbork Transit Camp, Drenthe, Netherlands taken in March 1945 (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
At Westerbork she worked as a social worker, which allowed her to travel many times between the camp and Amsterdam. She had ample opportunity to go into hiding to save herself, but she refused to do so. Inevitably, on 7 September 1943, Etty and her family, who had arrived in Westerbork a while earlier, were put on a transport to Auschwitz. One of Etty’s friends who saw her off writes in a letter to friends that Etty was “her normal cheerful self, having a word of encouragement and kindness for all she met”. Etty wrote a postcard to another friend and threw it out of the train. It was found by farmers and posted. It says that “they had left the camp singing”. As soon as they arrived in Auschwitz on 10 September, her parents were sent to the gas chambers. On 30 November the Red Cross reported Etty’s death. Her brother Mischa died on 31 March 1944, and her other brother Jaap died on his way back to the Netherlands after having been liberated from Bergen-Belsen.
Before Etty went to Westerbork she gave her diaries to her friend Maria Tuinzing, who passed them on to a writer, Klaas Smelik. He and his daughter Johanna, who transcribed the diaries, started looking for a publisher for them in 1947. No-one wanted to publish them; they were considered “too philosophical”.
It was only in 1981 that the diaries were published in Dutch as Het verstoorde leven (An Interrupted Life). Since then, interest in and research into Etty Hillesum and her work have only grown. There are conferences, books and two museums; one in her birth town of Middelburg which opened in 2020 and one in Deventer. Translations of the diaries into French, Italian, English, German, Danish and Finnish followed.
Etty Hillesum’s diaries with a page of her handwriting. Reproduced in Judith Koelemeijer, Etty Hillesum: het verhaal van haar leven (Amsterdam, 2022) YF.2023.a.27.
Why not let the diaries speak for themselves?
The sky is full of birds, the purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully, two little old women have sat down on the box for a chat, the sun is shining on my face — and right before our eyes, mass murder. The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension. (8 June 1943)
And if there were only one good German, then he would be worthy of protection against the whole barbaric gang and because of that one good German one should not pour one’s hatred onto a whole people. (15 March 1941)
And if God does not help me to go on, then I shall have to help God. — The surface of the earth is gradually turning into one great prison camp, and soon there will be nobody left outside. … I don’t fool myself about the real state of affairs, and I’ve even dropped the pretence that I’m out to help others. I shall merely try to help God as best I can, and if I succeed in doing that, then I shall be of use to others as well. But I mustn't have heroic illusions about that either. (11 June 1942)
Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.
Marja Kingma, Curator Germanic Language Collections, specialist Dutch.
References/further reading:
Etty Hillesum, Het verstoorde leven: Dagboek van Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943, 18e druik (Amsterdam, 1986) YA.1988.a.1992 (English Translation by Arnold J. Pomerans, An Interrupted Life: the Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43 (London, 1999) YC.2004.a.8709.
Etty Hillesum, Drie brieven van den kunstschilder Johannes Baptiste van der Pluym (1843-1912): met twee reproducties, uitgegeven en van een toelichting voorzien door A.C.G. Botterman-v.d. Pluym. (Apeldoorn, 1917 [i.e. Haarlem, 1943]) Cup.406.b.78. (Letters written to David Koning from Westerbork in 1943 and published clandestinely the same year.)
Philippe Noble, ‘De dagboeken en brieven van Etty Hillesum in Franse vertaling: Het dubbele filter’ In: Filter: tijdschrift over vertalen, Vol. 9, nr 3 (2002) pp. 37-48. YF.2007.a.229
Oord, Gerrit van, ‘Het dagboek van Etty Hillesum in Italië’ (Nijmegen, 2002) In: Filter: tijdschrift over vertalen, Vol. 9, nr 3 (2002) pp. 49-56.
Veel mooie woorden: Etty Hillesum en haar boekje Levenskunst,edited by Ria van den Brandt and Peter Nissen (Hilversum, 2017) YF.2018.a.20211.
Spirituality in the Writings of Etty Hillesum: Proceedings of the Etty Hillesum Conference at Ghent University, November 2008, edited by Klaas A.D. Smelik et al. (Leiden, 2010). Supplements to The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, vol. 11. YD.2012.a.877.
Klaas A.D. Smelik, Reading Etty Hillesum in Context: Writings, Life, and Influences of a Visionary author (Amsterdam, 2018) YD.2018.a.3834
The Lasting Significance of Etty Hillesum’s Writings: Proceedings of the Third International Etty Hillesum Conference at Middelburg, September 2018, edited by Klaas A.D. Smelik (Amsterdam, 2019) YD.2021.a.1416. Also available online free of charge.
Etty: de nagelaten geschriften van Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943, edited by Klaas A.D. Smelik, Gideon Lodders, Rob Tempelaars. 2nd ed. (Amsterdam, 1987) YA.1989.a.8106.
24 January 2025
Beyond Traditional Monuments: Commemorating the Lost Jewish Community of Kaunas
For centuries Lithuania was an important spiritual and cultural centre of Jewish life. The biggest Jewish communities were in Vilnius (‘Jerusalem of the North’) and Kaunas, the second biggest city in Lithuania. Before the Nazi invasion in June 1941, around 240,000 Jews lived in Lithuania; only several thousand – around 5% – survived the Holocaust.
In the interwar period Kaunas, a temporary capital of Lithuania, had a flourishing, vibrant and dynamic Jewish community. At one point a third of the inhabitants of Kaunas – 33,000 people – were Jewish. The city had around 40 synagogues and prayer houses, including the Slobodka yeshiva, one of the largest and best known yeshivas in Europe.
Gerardas Bagdonavičius, The Old Synagogue in the Old Town, 1930. Reproduced in Aliza Cohen-Mushlin, Synagogues in Lithuania: a catalogue (Vilnius, 2010). YD.2011.b.2062
The Jewish educational network consisted of numerous Yiddish and Hebrew schools. There was a flourishing artistic and music scene. The city had a Yiddish and a Hebrew theatre, several daily Jewish newspapers, sports clubs and youth organisations. Jewish political organisations were thriving. Social welfare organisations and charitable societies took care of those less fortunate; the Kaunas Jewish Hospital cared for both Jewish and non-Jewish patients. In 1920 the Central Jewish bank was established in Kaunas, leading a network of 85 Jewish banks.
Posters advertising cultural events in Lithuanian and Yiddish, image from Hidden history of the Kovno Ghetto, general editor Dennis B. Klein (Boston, 1997). LB.31.c.9499
Football match in the Kaunas Maccabi Stadium between the Kovas Club of Šančiai and the Maccabi Sports Club, April 25, 1926, image from Žydųgyvenimas Kaune iki holokausto (Vilnius, 2021). YF.2023.a.2399
Central Jewish Bank. Image from Wikimedia Commons
During the Nazi occupation the Kaunas Jewish community was almost completely destroyed. How to commemorate those who perished in such tragic circumstances?
The 11th Kaunas Biennial, which took place in 2017, explored the theme of monuments. What is a monument? Is our understanding of monuments changing? Is there a need for different kinds of commemoration? During the biennial the participating artists created, among others, a number of site-specific performances and installations referencing Kaunas’ Jewish past.
The artist Jenny Kagan, whose parents survived the Kaunas Ghetto, in her installation Murmuration, using a video projection and LED lighting, evoked the memory of the lost Jewish community. A brightly lit up building of a former Hasidic synagogue (the lights followed the rhythm of street lighting) on closer inspection turned out to be empty and derelict. The emptiness of the building is reminiscent of an empty sky from which starlings, known for their murmurations, quickly disappear, their numbers drastically declining.
Murmuration, from Yra ir nėra = There and not there: (im)possibility of a monument (Kaunas, 2018) [awaiting shelfmark]
Paulina Pukytė curated several performances and installations for the 11th Kaunas Biennial. One of them was At Noon in Democrats’ Square. Every day at noon, from 15 October to 30 November 2017, in the Vilijampolė district of Kaunas, a singer stood facing the empty space which once was Demokratų Square. The singer sang two songs in Yiddish: Yankele and My Yiddishe Mame. The performance lasted 7 minutes.
At Noon in Democrats’ Square, from Yra ir nėra
Vilijampolė, also known as Slobodka, on the right bank of the Neris River, was the site of the Kaunas Ghetto where thousands of Jews perished during the Holocaust. On 29 October, 1941, the day of the so called ‘Great Action’, around 27,000 Jews were forced to assemble on Demokratų Square. Men, women and children stood there for hours while a selection took place. Those deemed strong enough to work were temporarily saved; the rest, 9,200 of them, were executed the next day in Fort IX, part of the city‘s fortifications turned into a temporary prison.
At Noon at Democrats Square was a commemoration of those who perished as a result of the ‘Great Action’.
Paulina Pukytė, the chief curator of the 11th Kaunas Biennial, is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and critic, and lecturer at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She will talk about the (im)possibility of monuments at the Holocaust Memorial Day event, held at the British Library on 27th of January.
Ela Kucharska-Beard, Curator Slavonic and East European Collections
References and further reading:
Paulina Pukytė, Kas yra = Something is (Vilnius, 2021) [awaiting shelfmark]
Arūnas Bubnys, Kaunas ghetto 1941-1944 (Vilnius, 2014). YD.2016.a.992
Martin Winstone, The Holocaust Sites of Europe : an Historical Guide (London, 2015). YC.2016.a.6368
Nick Sayers, The Jews of Lithuania: a Journey Through the Long Twentieth Century (London, 2024)
22 January 2025
Silenced memories: the Holocaust Narrative in the Soviet Union
Monument to children murdered in Babi Yar, Ukraine (image from Wikipedia)
‘Field of Burial’ where the ashes of murdered and cremated prisoners were scattered, Maly Trostenets, Belarus (image from Wikipedia)
In 1961, a young Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko visited the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv. He was taken there by a fellow writer Anatolii Kuznetsov. A native of Kyiv, Kuznetsov experienced Nazi occupation as a child and knew about the tragedy in Babi Yar firsthand. Both authors were shocked to see that there was no sign in memory of 33,771 Jews who had been murdered by the Nazis just in two days in September 1941. Possibly over 100,000 more people, among them prisoners of war, Soviet partisans, Ukrainian nationalists and Roma people, were killed there in the following months. However, the Soviet authorities were reluctant to collect and disclose records of those crimes. On the same day, Yevtushenko wrote a poem:
No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.
I am afraid.
Today I am as old in years
as all the Jewish people.
Cover of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The collected poems 1952-1990 (Edinburgh, 1991) YC.1991.b.6558
The poem was published in the influential Moscow newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta (‘The Literary Newspaper’) but was severely criticised by the authorities and Communist Party officials for presenting Jews as the main victims of the fascist Germany.
Immediately after the end of the Second World War, Stalin designed his own antisemitic campaigns such as the prosecution of members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee and the Night of the Murdered Poets, the campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’and the so-called ‘doctors’ plot’. Although the campaigns stopped with the death of Stalin, antisemitism in the Soviet Union was strong, and the official party line was not to accept the Holocaust as a concept. Instead, all victims of genocide and atrocities were put together under the ideologically loaded term ‘peaceful Soviet civilians’.
However, in the time of the Khrushchev Thaw artists were hopeful that their voices would be heard in the new political climate. In 1962, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No 13 for bass soloist, bass chorus, and large orchestra with lyrics by Yevtushenko. Although the symphony does not have an official title, it is known as ‘Babi Yar’. Anatolii Kuznetsov tried to publish his autobiographical book also under the title of Babi Yar. The book was seriously cut by censors but was eventually published in 1967. After defecting to the West, Kuznetsov managed to publish the book in full in 1970.
Anatolii Kuznetsov, Babii Iar: roman-dokument (Frankfurt am Main, 1970) X.900/6037
However, neither Yevtushenko, nor Kuznetsov were the first to write about Babi Yar. Probably the first poem (lost and rediscovered only in 1991) about the murder in Babi Yar was written by a Jewish-Ukrainian poet Liudmila Titova in 1941:
The order was supported by the threat of execution,
They obeyed but were shot.
Not a single candle was lit that night,
Those who could, left and hid in the basement.
The stars and the Sun hid in the clouds
From our world that is too cruel.
Liudmila Titova (image from Wikipedia)
In 1943, another Ukrainian poet and at that time a Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers (Commissars) of the Ukrainian SSR, Mykola Bazhan,wrote his response:
The grave wind blew from those ravines —
The smoke of mortal fires, the smoking of burning bodies.
Kyiv watched, angry Kyiv,
As Babi Yar was thrown into flames.
There can be no atonement for this flame.
There is no measure of revenge for this burning.
Cursed be the one who dares to forget.
Cursed be the one who tells us: “forgive me...”
Only in 1991 was a Ukrainian Jewish poet, Yurii Kaplan, able to compile a small anthology – Ekho Bab’ego IAra (‘The Echo of Babi Yar’) where he managed to include other pieces of contemporary poetry.
Page from Literatura ta Zhittia, N 2, zhovten’, 2007.
Cover of Ekho Bab'ego Iara : poeticheskaia antologiia (Kyiv, 1991) YA.1996.a.9243
In 1946, Ilya Ehrenburg, a prominent Soviet writer, published a poem under the title of ‘Babi Yar’ about the genocide of his people:
My child! My blush!
My countless relatives!
I hear how you call me
from every hole.
Together with another Jewish Soviet writer Leonid Grossman, Ehrenburg compiled and tried to publish a volume of eyewitness accounts documenting the atrocities during the Holocaust on the Soviet territories occupied by the Nazis.
During the war, frontline soldiers sent Ilya Ehrenburg a huge number of documents found in the territories liberated from the occupiers and told in their letters what they had seen or heard. Ehrenburg decided to collect the diaries, suicide letters, and testimonies related to the Nazis’ extermination of Jews and to publish the ‘Black Book’. A couple of extracts from the book were published in a magazine in 1944. However, after the end of the war, the publication was delayed several times. In November 1948, when the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was closed, the set of the ‘Black Book’ was scattered, the galleys (printer’s proof) and the manuscript were taken away. Ehrenburg’s daughter later gave the manuscript and other documents to the Yad Vashem archives and the book was published in Russian in 1980. However, that was not the full text. The first full Russian edition appeared only in 1991.
The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry : [prepared by] Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, translated and edited by David Patterson ; with a foreword by Irving Louis Horowitz and an introduction by Helen Segall. (London, 2002) YC.2002.b.953
The book documents atrocities that were committed on all occupied Soviets territories, such sites as Fort IX in Kovno (Kaunas), the Rumbula and Bikernieki Forests in Riga and Maly Trostenets near Minsk and Zmiyovskaya Balka near Rostov-on-Don.
Analysing the policy of ‘forgetting the specificity of Jewish suffering’, Izabella Tabarovsky of the Kennan Institute, points out that “by 2006, Yad Vashem, the world’s leading Holocaust Museum and research institution, found it had barely 10-15% of the names of the 1.5 million Jews who had died in Ukraine (in contrast to 90% of European Jews whose names were known)”.
At the Holocaust Memorial Day Fragments of the Past: Holocaust Legacies and Commemoration, Professor Jeremy Hicks will give a talk on ‘ Representations of the Holocaust in Soviet Cinema’, which will examine further the creation of silences and gaps in memories of Holocaust.
Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator, East European Collections
References/Further reading:
Maxim D. Shrayer (2010). ‘Poets Bearing Witness to the Shoah’ in Studies in Slavic Languages and Literature (ICCEES Congress Stockholm 2010 Papers and Contributions), edited by Stefano Garzonio. PECOB: Portal on Central Eastern and Balkan Europe. University of Bologna. Pp. 59-119.
Ekho Bab’ego IAra: poeticheskaia antologiia, [sostavlenie i vstupitelʹnaia statʹiia IU.G. Kaplana]. (Kyiv, 1991). YA.1996.a.9243
A. Anatoli (Kuznetsov), Babi Yar: a Document in the Form of a Novel, translated by David Floyd. (London, 1970) W67/8178
Izabella Tabarovsky. Don’t Learn from Russians about the Holocaust. Published: February 2, 2017
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