Estate Dirichlet

The partial estate of the mathematician Gustav (Lejeune) Dirichlet and his wife Rebecka, née Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, in Kassel contains mainly correspondence between the couple, with their children and with their mother and mother-in-law Elisabeth Lejeune Dirichlet, but also with close acquaintances. It thus provides a broad insight into the private and social life of the avid letter-writer Rebecka Dirichlet and her closest circle in the second quarter of the 19th century. - Further letters by Rebecka are mainly preserved in the Mendelssohn Archive of the SBB-PK.

The Kassel collection also documents the decades of correspondence between Gustav Dirichlet and his mother Elisabeth, with whom he had an extraordinarily close relationship throughout his life. The correspondence spans the years of his school days in Cologne (from 1820) to his last trip to Switzerland shortly before his death (1858). - Dirichlet's scientific correspondence, as far as it has been preserved, is held by the Berlin State Library (SBB-PK) (Nachl. Peter Dirichlet) and the Archive of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW).

The collection also contains two smaller closed bundles of letters to Rebecka's and Gustav's eldest son Walter Dirichlet (1833-1887). These include 50 letters from his cousin Sebastian Hensel (1830-1898), who was about the same age and closely associated with him, as well as letters from various relatives and acquaintances.

The collection of letters is supplemented by life documents of the Dirichlet couple, which relate to Gustav Dirichlet's scientific career and professional honors, but also to Rebecka's income from his parents' inheritance.

The letters come from the estate of the philosopher Leonard Nelson (1882-1927), a great-grandson of Rebecka and Gustav Dirichlet, who died young.

Until summer 2019, the partial Dirichlet-Nelson estate was owned by the "Philosophisch-Politische Akademie e.V.", now based in Bonn, and has since been transferred to the Kassel University Library in order to preserve the important collection in its entirety for the public and to ensure that the material remains freely accessible for science and research in the long term

The letters have been digitized and are available via the online archive of the Kassel University Library ORKA.