Valeriu Marcu

In 2024, a book from Valeriu Marcu's library could be given back.

Valeriu Marcu was born in Bucharest on 8 March 1899. He was a writer, historian and poet and had lived in Berlin since 1920. Marcu was already politically active at a young age. He wrote for socialist, communist and pacifist newspapers and magazines. In the mid-1920s, Marcu turned more and more towards conservative circles. In 1927, he wrote the first biography of Vladimir Lenin.

In 1933, Marcu and his wife Eva Gerson fled to France via Switzerland. His extensive library was confiscated. He was able to emigrate to the United States in 1941. Valeriu Marcu died in New York City on 4 July 1942.

Valeriu Marcu's private library, comprising around 15-20,000 volumes, was looted in several stages in Germany and France. After his escape from Berlin, the collection was initially confiscated by the German authorities. When the library was released in the fall of 1933, thanks to the intervention of friends, around a third of the volumes were missing, according to Marcu. When Marcu was forced to emigrate to the United States, he had to leave his remaining books behind in Nice. He is said to have given them to a family friend, but what happened to the collection after Marcus's death and the end of the World War II is not yet known. Volumes with Marcu's ownership stamps were also registered in the Offenbach Archival Depot after 1945.

The book identified in the ZLB was incorporated into the holdings of the Berlin City Library (Berliner Stadtbibliothek) as a gift in 1947. The supplier is listed in the corresponding acquisition journal as the “salvage office” (Bergungsstelle), specifically number 153 (Library of the Seminary for Oriental Languages). According to the corresponding report, this salvage site was located in Berlin at Schinkelplatz 6, the former Berlin Bauakademie. The Bauakademie was the main building and central library of the Deutsches Auslandswissenschaftliches Institut (German Institute for Foreign Studies, DAWI), as the Seminary for Oriental Languages was originally called. It was founded in 1887 and affiliated with the Friedrich Wilhelm University.

Since its foundation in 1940, the DAWI served as a research institute and documentation center for the closely intertwined and almost identical Faculty of Foreign Studies (Auslandswissenschaftliche Fakultät) at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin. Together with the faculty, which functioned primarily as a diplomatic school, the institute had the task of educating people in Nazi ideology about the relations of foreign states with Germany. It also served as a foreign information center for party and government institutions.

The DAWI libraries (the central and seminar libraries) contained several hundred thousand volumes. An unknown number of these were book gifts from the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA).

The book also contains an acquisition number (“1937G3629”) and a corresponding shelfmark (I K 55), as well as a note (“Hahn tausch 189”), above Marcu's ownership mark and the number of the salvage office. Corresponding acquisition numbers and signatures have already been identified several times in the stock of the Berlin City Library in books from salvage site 153 (but also salvage site 7, library of the Reich Aviation Ministry). They are listed in the cooperative provenance database Looted Cultural Assets as a “phantom library”, based on a designation by the ZLB's first provenance researcher, Detlef Bockenkamm. Bockenkamm's suspicion of a connection to the Institute for Political Pedagogy (Institut für Politische Pädagogik) has not been substantiated to date. Books from the “phantom library” have been identified as Nazi loot on several occasions, mostly from libraries of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the German Democratic Party (DDP) or from labor unions.

The ZLB received valuable support for this restitution from the provenance research department of the German Museum of Technology (Deutsches Technikmuseum), for which we would like to express our heartfelt gratitude!