Wolfenbüttel, 1 April 2025

Benny (Benjamin Jaakov) Mielziner (1853‒1926) was born in the Danish city of Aalborg. In 1876 he moved to Braunschweig, where he acquired citizenship in 1885. Between 1886 and 1921 he was a representative of the city’s Jewish Community, thereafter serving as its chairman until 1925. Mielziner was married to Marie Therese Widmann (1853‒1940). Of the couple’s children, five reached adulthood. Until the early 1930s, the family were respected members of the Braunschweig bourgeoisie, but after the Nazis came to power in 1933, they increasingly suffered under the regime’s repressive anti-Semitic measures. Some members of the family managed to go underground in the Netherlands, while others escaped persecution by emigrating to Great Britain or Monaco.

Mielziner was regarded as highly educated and an expert on German classical literature, especially the work of Goethe. No reliable information exists about the fate of his private library after his death in 1926. The volume Studien über Goethe (Studies on Goethe) from the HAB’s holdings is part of the collection of the literary scholar Hans Pyritz (1905–1958) acquired by the HAB in 1987. The collection was amassed between the 1930s and the 1950s and as such should be critically scrutinised for books potentially seized by the Nazis. It contains many antiquarian items.

Mielziner’s great-grandchildren are still alive. Having ascertained that they were entitled to inherit the book, the HAB restituted it to the community of heirs in December 2024. They, in turn, decided to leave it in the HAB’s holdings as a gift in order for it to remain accessible to scholars and interested members of the public.

The provenance of the volume was researched 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: Detail of the title page with the ex libris indicating Benny Mielziner’s ownership