UB Kassel Receives Important Estate of Letters from the Dirichlet-Mendelssohn Family

The Philosophisch-Politische Akademie e.V., based in Bonn, generously transfers ownership of the partial Dirichlet estate to the UB Kassel in order to preserve this collection, which is extraordinarily important for the cultural and scientific history of the 19th century, in its entirety for the public and to ensure its free accessibility in perpetuity.

The letters come from the estate of the philosopher Leonard Nelson (1882-1927), a great-grandson of Rebecka and Gustav Dirichlet, who died at an early age and bequeathed his library and other possessions to the Philosophical-Political Academy (PPA). They had been transferred to the Kassel State Library during the period of National Socialist injustice and had been kept there ever since.

The more than 1,000 letters, whose existence was previously known only to narrow specialist circles, are the private correspondence of Rebecka Dirichlet, née Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1811-1858), the sister of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Fanny Hensel, and of her husband, the well-known mathematician Gustav (Lejeune) Dirichlet (1805-1859). The collection mainly covers the period from about 1822 to 1858 and contains correspondence of the couple with each other and with Dirichlet's mother, but also with close acquaintances of both, thus providing a broad insight into the private and social life of the avid letter writer Rebecka Dirichlet and her closest environment.

The collection of letters now stored in the UB Kassel was kept together with Nelson's private library and the library of the Philosophical-Political Academy (PPA) in the Walkemühle near Melsungen until the fall of 1934. From 1922/24, the Philosophical-Political Academy, the central educational and training facility of the anti-fascist International Socialist Fighting League (ISK) and the International Youth League (IJB), was located there. As early as mid-March 1933, the Walkemühle was occupied by the National Socialists and soon thereafter rededicated as a National Socialist leadership school. The residents of the Walkemühle had to flee into exile in Denmark after the dissolution of their training center, while the PPA was expropriated and dissolved by the Prussian state.

However, the extensive library of the Walkemühle as well as other written material could be withdrawn from the grasp of the NSDAP in September 1934 through the cooperation of the centrist Heinrich von Gagern, then District Administrator of the district of Melsungen, and the director of the Kassel State Library Dr. Wilhelm Hopf, who was not affiliated with the regime, by transferring the holdings to Kassel, where they were immediately incorporated into the holdings of the State Library. While the books were burned during the bombing raid in 1941 together with the print holdings of the State Library, the letter material survived the war unscathed.

The letters will be successively digitized in the near future and made accessible via the online archive of the Kassel University Library ORKA. A preliminary inventory list can be viewed on the website of Kassel University Library.

Inventory list: https://www.uni-kassel.de/ub/historisches-erbe/sondersammlungen/nachlaesse/dirichlet.html

Contact:
Dr. Brigitte Pfeil
Kassel University Library
Head of Department IV: Regional Library, Head of Special Collections
Phone +49 561 804-7344
pfeil@bibliothek.uni-kassel.de