Wolfenbüttel, 10 December 2024
The private library of Valeriu Marcu, which originally comprised some 15,000 to 20,000 volumes, fell victim in several stages to persecution by the Nazis. As a young man, Marcu was active in communist circles in Romania and Switzerland. In 1920 he moved to Berlin, where he wrote for press organs of the bourgeois left such as Weltbühne and Berliner Tageblatt. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, he soon decided to emigrate and settled in the south of France with his wife, Eva Dorothea (née Gerson, 1907‒2004), who was likewise Jewish. After he left Germany, his collection was initially seized by the authorities. Although friends of Marcu’s managed to get it back in autumn 1933, he reported that a good third of the books were missing.
After the military defeat of France by the German Reich and the establishment of the Vichy regime, Marcu and his wife once again had to endure repressive measures. In 1941 he eventually managed to flee to the United States together with his family. In this second, forced emigration he had to leave behind what remained of his library in Nice. Marcu died in New York on 4 December 1942. To date it has not been possible to reconstruct what happened to the collection between his death and the end of the Second World War.
The book from his private library identified by the HAB was acquired from a British antiquarian bookseller in 1987. As well as Marcu’s stamp, it also carries an ex libris in English dating from 1964. How and when it came to Great Britain can no longer be determined. In autumn 2024 the HAB restituted the volume to Marcu’s daughter and heir.
The provenance of the volume was investigated as part of the project ‘Assets looted by the Nazis among the antiquarian holdings acquired by the Herzog August Bibliothek since 1969’, funded by the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste (German Lost Art Foundation). The systematic investigation of the HAB’s holdings to locate cultural assets seized as a consequence of Nazi persecution continues under the auspices of the current project ‘Assets looted by the Nazis among the Herzog August Bibliothek’s accessions made between 1933 and 1969’, likewise funded by the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste.
Illustration: Stamp of ownership that allowed the book to be clearly identified as belonging to the private library of Valeriu Marcu. Source: HAB.
