The Paris conference Où sont les bibliothèques spoliées par les nazis? Tentatives d'identification et de restitution, un chantier en cours.

Published on 26 April 2017

On 23 - 24 March 2017, the international conference Où sont les bibliothèques spoliées par les Nazis took place in Paris. As the title suggests, the conference was concerned with libraries stolen by the Nazis during the World War II.

The first conference day took place in the lecture room of the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations, the second was held in the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France).

In addition to numerous talks by researchers from France and Austria, contributions from researchers from the U.S.A., Israel and Russia were heard.

The project Books Discovered Once Again was presented by our Norwegian colleague from the partner institution Stiftelsen Arkivet, Gro Kvanvig, with by her talk on Norwegian libraries during World War II and discovering of Norwegian Masonic books in the post-war Czechoslovakia. (Libraries in Norway during World War II and the story of how the Norwegian Freemasonic Library ended up in a castle in the Czech Republic). The project was also presented by a roll-up poster explaining the structure of the reserve fonds of the National Library of the Czech Republic, and the restitutions concerning the property of allies in the post-war Czechoslovakia. The next, this time Czech conference speaker, Michal Bušek from the Jewish Museum in Prague, talked about the ongoing provenience research of this institution.

Besides the general issues of library spoilage, case studies were discussed too. The round-table discussion was very productive, concerning the future directions of research and the necessity of international cooperation, particularly in the area of provenience research.