Published on 25 September 2016
Carl Mayer von Rothschild (1788-1855) was born to a German-Jewish banking family and had four sons who travelled in Europe and ran the family’s banking activities. This prosperous family had several properties in Frankfurt, and in 1888 they opened a public library according to the model used by public libraries in England where anyone could borrow books for free. It was Carl von Rothschild’s grandchild, Hannah Louise von Rothschild, who ran the library.
When the library opened, it had 3,500 titles to loan out. The collection comprised titles in art and literary science in European languages, theology, library science, economics as well as books for children and students. At the end of 1892, the collection had grown to over 13,000 titles. Many of the books were gifts.
In 1928, the Rothschild foundation that ran the library had a significant loss due to inflation after the First World War, and could not continue running the library. Both the building the library occupied and the collections were then transferred to the City of Frankfurt and continued to be run as a city library under the leadership of Joachim Kirchner. In 1933, the library changed its name and thereafter was known as “the public library for modern languages and music” and in 1935, the Rothschild family name was finally deleted as the City of Frankfurt merged the Rothschild collections together with the city library and the university library.
Joachim Kirchner joined the NSDAP in March 1933 and was soon the regional “Culture Director” for Alfred Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur. On 17 May 1933, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted the irony that the previous director for the Rothschild library was now responsible for “cleansing” Frankfurt’s public libraries of Jewish literature. Kirchner acted as literary expert on behalf of the police in Frankfurt and was in 1940 appointed Director of the Munich University Library as a reward for his efforts.
The parts of the Rothschild collection that were not “cleansed” in the actions to remove all Jewish literature from public libraries, remained undamaged throughout the war and today comprise an important part of the Frankfurt University Library.