The music collection of the former Prussian State Library at the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, Poland: past, present, and future developments

In March 1997, to commemorate the 170th anniversary of the death of Beethoven, the Jagiellonian Library held an exhibition of his autographs (Zwiercan, 1997). For the first time since the end of World War II, his Symphony No. 8 in F major, op. 93 was displayed in one piece, part 3 from the Jagiellonian Library and parts 1, 2, and 4 borrowed from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preugischer Kulturbesitz. During the opening ceremony Antonius Jammers, the director of the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, thanked his Polish colleagues for preserving the collections of the former Prussian State Library and made clear his understanding that they had not been plundered by Poland but rather the Polish authorities had "saved these important cultural and historical documents from the Soviet grip, and [possibly] from insecure transfer to Moscow or some other location" (Jammers, 1997b). He also said that out of 45,000 pages comprising the prewar collection of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart autographs, about 20 percent were located in the Jagiellonian Library, including 3 percent of all of Bach's pages, 43 percent of all of Mozart's pages, and 12 percent of all of Beethoven's pages. Referring to Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, he called it "a small example of an unnatural division of the Prussian treasure between Berlin and Krakow" (Jammers, 1997b). Finally, he offered financial help with the expansion of the Jagiellonian Library and expressed the hope that by 2002 the collection of Beethoven autographs would be returned to Berlin, promising the Jagiellonian Library a complete set of microfilms of all of this material (Jammers, 1997b). Speaking on the same occasion, Laurdis Hoelscher, Consul General of Germany in Krakow, emphasized the importance of the former Prussian State Library collections for Germany's cultural identity and heritage. He stated that various parts of the music collection, though "separated by the war, complement each other and should be taken back in one piece to the place of their origin--Berlin" (Hoelscher, 1997). These remarks were not received favorably by the Poles. In an interview with a local newspaper in Krakow, for example, Krzysztof Zamorski, director of the Jagiellonian Library, rejected Germany's offer of financial help, stating that "we are not trading the Berlinka (Berlin Library) [collection] off" and reiterated that "the Berlinka (Berlin Library) collection found itself in Poland as the result of the war, which had not been started by Poland" (Zamorski, 1997b). It seemed obvious that Polish-German negotiations had reached another impasse.

In December 2000 Polish prime minister Jerzy Buzek made a spectacular gesture by returning the 1522 German edition of the Bible that had been translated by Martin Luther and that had been owned by the Prussian State Library to German chancellor Gerard Schroder (Czubek & Kowiewski, 2004, p. 130). Buzek's action reminded many of Gierek's decision to return a few items from the music collection of the Prussian State Library to East Germany in the late 1970s. Like Gierek's gesture, it did not break the impasse surrounding the negotiations to return the whole of the Prussian State Library collections to Germany.