Baerwald, Emil and Jenny

Emil Baerwald was born on 5 February 1869 in Frankfurt am Main; his father Herman Baerwald (1828-1907) was the director of the Philanthropin, a Jewish private school. In 1891, Emil Baerwald went to New York, where he worked as a merchant and married Jenny Dreyfus from Basel (born on 28 March 1880) in 1906. In 1925, the couple moved to Berlin but continued travelling regularly to the USA. Because of the increased persecution they experienced under the Nazi regime, Emil and Jenny Baerwald decided to return to the USA. While Jenny Baerwald was an American citizen and therefore able to travel more freely, Emil Baerwald, as a German citizen, had to apply for a U.S. visa, which he obtained through contacts at the American consulate in Berlin. He travelled to the USA in August 1938, returning to Europe once more in the autumn of that same year but without entering Germany. In the autumn of 1938, Jenny Baerwald spent a brief time in Berlin tying up their affairs in the city before the couple finally emigrated to New York at the beginning of March 1939. Emil Baerwald became an American citizen in 1944 and died in New York City in 1948; Jenny Baerwald died in 1965.

Emil and Jenny Baerwald’s bookplate was used to identify one of the books from the couple’s former private library, which was found in the collection held by the German Museum of Books and Writing. The book was purchased for the German Museum of Books and Writing in 1956 through Deutsche Buchexport GmbH at an auction held by antiquarian book dealer Gerd Rosen in West Berlin. It is not known who put the book up for auction. It was presumably confiscated after the Baerwalds emigrated and found its way into Berlin’s book trade at an unknown later date. This hypothesis is supported by a comparable copy from the same library, which was identified at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin and returned to its rightful owners in 2018.

Thanks to close communication with provenance researchers at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin, the German National Library was able to contact the Baerwalds’ legal successors and return the book in the summer of 2022. Before doing so, we were permitted to prepare a digitised version so that the book will still be accessible to the public in digital format.

Further information:

• Digital copy of the restitution copy in the catalogue: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, West-oestlicher Divan, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1819, Link to the record
• Link to the Provenance indicator in the cooperative database Looted Cultural Assets (last retrieved on 22 July 2022)
• Information about the restitution at the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin in 2018 (last retrieved on 1 August 2022)
• MSS 109, George S. Messersmith papers, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware (last retrieved on 1 August 2022)