The history of the University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg (JCS) begins long before the founding of Goethe University in 1914. Its roots can be traced back to 1484 to the former Council Library in the city of Frankfurt. In 1763, the Frankfurt physician Johann Christian Senckenberg founded what later became Senckenberg Library in his will. In 1928, the city of Frankfurt took over Rothschild Library, which had opened in 1888.

Rothschild Library, Senckenberg Library and the Municipal Library began supplying literature to the newly founded University of Frankfurt am Main in 1914. On March 22, 1944, the building of the Municipal Library was destroyed during the air raids on Frankfurt am Main. Only a good third of the holdings could be saved by being moved to Upper Franconia; the rest was destroyed, as was a large part of the administrative files.

After the Second World War, the Municipal Library merged with other libraries to form Frankfurt Municipal and University Library (Stadt- und Universitaetsbibliothek or StUB). Since 2005, the StUB and Senckenberg Library have been united in the University Library JCS with the Goethe University as responsible body.

In November 2020, the University Library JCS started a project on provenance research, funded by the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste (German Lost Art Foundation) for an initial period of two years and located in the Archive Center of the University Library JCS.

In the course of the project, around 80,000 volumes of the University Library JCS will be checked for their provenance. Two sections of the old holdings with publication years up to 1945 are to be examined in the project. Random sampling has already yielded several suspicious cases in these holdings. Accession records from this period are available but provide little information about suspicious items.

 

Frankfurt University Library
Provenance Research Team
Bockenheimer Landstrasse 134-138
60325 Frankfurt/Main

https://www.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/provenienz/projekt-raubgut.html

E-Mail: provenienzforschung@ub.uni-frankfurt.de