The lost library of the Walkemühle near Melsungen in double focus

On the one hand, the important correspondence of Rebecka Dirichlet, née Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1811-1858), the sister of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Fanny Hensel, and her husband, the important mathematician Gustav (Lejeune) Dirichlet (1805-1859), has now been fully digitized and is accessible via the online repository ORKA. In addition, more than two thirds of the 1,100 letters, some of which are extremely difficult to read, have also been transcribed by Dr. Andrea Linnebach-Wegener on behalf of the library. The collection of letters comes from the estate of the philosopher Leonard Nelson (1882-1927), a great-grandson of Rebecka and Gustav Dirichlet, who had bequeathed his library and other possessions to the Philosophical-Political Academy. The library and the estate of letters had been transferred to the Kassel State Library during the period of National Socialist injustice. While the library holdings were burned in the Fridericianum in 1941, the correspondence estate was preserved and donated to the university library by the PPA in 2019.

Furthermore, the Federal Archives in Berlin recently restituted a volume from the library of the aforementioned academy: the 16-page typescript with the faded title "Die Walkemühle" contains the programmatic speech "Die Arbeit der Walkemühle" by Hellmut Rauschenplat (1929) as well as six personal memories of the teacher Anna Stein from the same period. Rauschenplat took the name Fritz Eberhard when he emigrated, was a member of the Parliamentary Council in 1948/49 and director of Süddeutscher Rundfunk from 1949 to 1958. Some of the PPA's library holdings were transferred to the Kassel State Library in 1934, while others were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1936 and taken to Berlin. The destruction of the state library in the Fridericianum in a firebomb attack in 1941 also destroyed the volumes from the Walkemühle library stored there. The volume that has now been returned was therefore part of the holdings that were brought to Berlin, reached Moscow after the end of the war and were finally received by the Federal Archives in Berlin via Potsdam.

Dr. Ralf Schaper was involved in both events. He grew up in the Walkemühle from 1945 to 1952. The mathematician from Kassel has been working intensively on the Dirichlet estate of letters for several years and is working on a book about the Walkemühle country education home. During his intensive research in the Federal Archives in Berlin, he came across the volume that has now been returned to the Kassel University Library.

Contact

Dr. Brigitte Pfeil

Kassel University Library - State Library and Murhard Library of the City of Kassel

Department IV: State Library / Location Brüder-Grimm-Platz

Head of Special Collections

Phone: +49 561 804-7344

E-mail: pfeil[at]bibliothek.uni-kassel[dot]de

Further information:

• On the history of the Walkemühle country education home: 
  https://www.landerziehungsheim-walkemuehle.de/index.php?title=Hauptseite
• On the Dirichlet estate in the Kassel State Library: 
  Accessioned as "old holdings" - On the forgetting, denial and rediscovery of the partial estate of Gustav (Lejeune) Dirichlet and his wife Rebecka, née Mendelssohn-Bartholdy / Brigitte Pfeil. https://doi.org/10.17170/kobra-202005061223
• On restitution and the handling of the PPA's library holdings:
  https://blog.ub.uni-kassel.de/blog/2025/05/14/ende-einer-langen-reise-von-der-gestapo-geraubtes-buch-zurueck-in-kassel/