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Literary Estates

The collection of bequests has a long tradition in Dresden and the first family archives entered the library as early as the 17th century. In the manuscript collection, around 500 bequests of artists, literary figures, scientists and musicians are currently preserved, catalogued and made accessible to researchers. The Royal Library of Dresden was able to acquire and make accessible to the public as early as 1854 the first estate of significance for the humanities, that of the classical philologist Karl August Böttiger (1760-1835), who was active as a chronicler of the Goethe period and an important personality of that time. Since 1873, the library has also owned most of the written estate of the critic and translator August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), who, together with his brother, the philosopher and writer Friedrich Schlegel, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte or the writers Ludwig Tieck and Novalis, shaped the Romantic school.

In addition to these estates, the SLUB's holdings include such important ones as those of the philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832), the eponym of the so-called Krausismo, which gained importance in 19th-century Spain, or the estate of the novelist Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), who is considered one of the most important chroniclers of the everyday life of a Jewish intellectual in 20th-century Germany. Among the most recent acquisitions is the estate of the journalist and food critic Wolfram Siebeck (1928-2016), which was added to the estate holdings in 2018 with the help of the Technical University of Dresden.

Of the approximately 370,000 autographs currently in the SLUB's holdings, the vast majority are in the written estates. Traditionally, bequests are acquired if the author and/or content of the object are to be considered historically and scientifically relevant for the cultural memory of Saxony. Acquisition, indexing and digitisation concepts anticipate current and future research questions.

Depending on their media specificity, these bequests belong to the holdings of the Manuscript Collection, the Music Department, the German Photographic Library and the Stenographic Collection.