The work conducted by the Provenance Research Unit of the University Library resembles that of a detective agency. It is basically detective work carried out by librarians who follow clues to investigate who a book originally belonged to. Their work deals with books that were looted, and the librarians try to find heirs of the original owners so that the books may be restituted, or returned to the heirs of the former owners.

The special feature of this “detective work” is that the forensics takes place almost exclusively in books and archives. In addition, the work is seemingly unending: Freie Universität owns more than seven million books. Of these, one million are potentially “suspicious” due to their publication dates. During the first ten years of its existence, the library’s Provenance Research Unit has looked through about 100,000 of these one million.

Ringo Narewski, head of the library’s Provenance Research Unit, has been involved in building it up since it was first founded. He describes the work of his team as follows: “We start very basically by taking a book from the shelf and looking at it. Are there any clues to its history? To a previous owner? That might be a bookplate, a name, a note, some sort of mark – it could be anything, even just a line drawn in pencil – that would cause us to look further.”

The Case of Michal Lampusiak

Then the more difficult, but also more interesting part of the work begins. Elena Brasiler, a research assistant at the library’s Provenance Research Unit, described the search for heirs of a particular book. She said that in this example, their work began when they found a particularly beautiful bookplate in a book in the library. It was a book by Jonas Wiesner, published in 1864, entitled Der Bann in seiner geschichtlichen Entwickelung auf dem Boden des Judenthumes [The Ban in Its Historical Development in Judaism]. On the bookplate there is a picture of a menorah on a hill with houses. Underneath the picture is the name Michal Lampusiak and the byline that the bookplate was produced in Rotterdam.

Brasiler says, “Our research in Dutch newspaper archives revealed that Michal Lampusiak originally came from Ozorków, a town north of Łódz in Poland. He was actually a tailor, but with a great passion for books. After the outbreak of the Polish-Soviet War in 1919, he wanted to emigrate to America, but instead chose Rotterdam, where he stayed, got married, and settled down. There he worked as a tailor and began collecting rare books.

When the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in 1940, his family hid him, which saved his life. After World War II, he fulfilled his lifelong dream of opening an antiquarian bookstore. We have managed to identify Michal Lampusiak’s three daughters and a grandson. We have tried to contact his grandson, but unfortunately have not been successful in this so far.”

Provenance Research Relatively New in Germany

Provenance research as it is conducted at Freie Universität is relatively new in Germany. It was not until the end of the 1990s that the German federal government, as well as many other governments, decided to make the restitution of looted cultural property a priority. Since then, many public institutions such as museums, libraries, and archives, are required to investigate their holdings.

Directly after World War II, there was an early phase of restitution called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, which was set up by the Allies in 1947. This program attempted to return cultural loot that had been stolen from Jewish families and communities, but it ended in 1952. A long phase followed in which those affected could only apply for redress on their own initiative.

At Freie Universität efforts have been undertaken since 2010 to determine if books in the university’s libraries were looted from their previous owners. At first this was done sporadically, but for the past ten years, it has been handled by the library’s Provenance Research Unit, which was set up to consolidate the efforts over a longer period of time.

The work has been made more difficult by the somewhat “improvised” founding of Freie Universität in 1948 and how the collections of the libraries came into being. In the early years the books were acquired by the university from students and faculty somewhat by chance thanks to spontaneous donations. Other supporters, patrons, and donors also contributed to the collections so that today it is not always possible to ascertain how a book found its way to Freie Universität, for example, whether it was purchased, received as a gift, or inherited. So far, it has been possible to return 568 books to the heirs of their previous owners.

A Case of Successful Restitution

Brasiler mentions another book that found its way back to its rightful owner. The book, entitled Freiheitskämpfe [Battles for Liberty] by Friedrich Naumann, published in 1911, was discovered in the holdings of Freie Universität’s social sciences and Eastern European studies library. According to the bookplate, it once belonged to the Sultan family, namely the successful Jewish spirits manufacturer Adolf Sultan, who in the interwar period often welcomed intellectuals such as Max Liebermann and Richard Strauss into his home. 

After 1933 the family was persecuted and driven out of the country. A daughter, the pianist Grete Sultan, managed to escape to the United States at the last minute. Brasiler says, “We do not know how the book reached Freie Universität. We only know that it was added to the university’s collections in 1952.” After the bookplate was published in the Looted Cultural Assets database, a great-great-granddaughter of the original owner, Barani Guttsman, contacted the university. Brasiler continues, “She was in Berlin conducting research on her family, and we were very happy that we could give the book to her as a representative of the community of heirs.”

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This article originally appeared in German in the Tagesspiegel newspaper supplement published by Freie Universität Berlin.