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The Lost Library: The Autobiography of a Culture
Born in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century, Walter Mehring inherited both his father’s respect for the civilizing power of literature and his formidable library of thousands of books. Like his father, believed that books and reading were essential to progress, mutual understanding, and contentment. After having served in World War I, Mehring spent the years between the world wars as part of the exhilarating avant-garde coffeehouse culture of Europe’s capitals; he himself was a poet, cabaret lyricist, and founder of the Dadaist movement in Berlin. But with the rise of fascism, Europe became a dangerous place for free-thinking artists. Mehring never envisioned that the culture of books celebrated in his father’s library would be rejected by the sudden rise to prominence of the Nationalist Socialist Party. Soon, even his own books were burned by the Brownshirts and Mehring was forced to roam Europe as a literary fugitive. From a precarious exile in Vienna, he arranged for his father’s books to be smuggled out of Germany, but their fate would be worse than his—while Mehring managed to slip out of Austria and avoid capture, his library was confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. In The Lost Library: The Autobiography of a Culture, translated by Richard and Clara Winston and presented in paperback for the first time, Mehring takes the reader with him as he unpacks the crates of books in his mind, and in the process recalls what each book meant to him and his father. Writing with wit and insight, Mehring successfully compares the humanism of his father’s era with the chaos of Europe at war, using his father’s library as a metaphor for how the optimism of nineteenth-century progress gave way to the disorder and book-burning of the twentieth.Times Literary Supplement
- GenresNonfiction
290 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1951
3 people are currently reading
151 people want to read
About the author
Walter Mehring
41 books5 followersWalter Mehring (29 April 1896 – 3 October 1981) was a German author and one of the most prominent satirical authors in the Weimar Republic. He was banned during the Third Reich, and fled the country.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 17, 2021
Walter Mehring kontrastiert die verlorene Bibliothek des Vaters, die dem Ideal der Aufklärung verpflichtet war, mit seinen eigenen avantgardistischen Bestrebungen. Beides, Aufklärung und Avantgarde, konnten den Nazis nichts entgegensetzen. Es bleibt die Beschreibung einer Kultur und einer Bibliothek, die nach der Barbarei des Nationalsozialismus nicht mehr existieren.
July 24, 2018
What a touching, strange little book.
May 6, 2011
“A man can become addicted to reading as to any other intoxicant.” After Walter Mehring’s father dies in his arms he inherits a library containing thousands of volumes and his father’s love of literature.
Merhing tells the tale of burning his own books, his interment by the Nazi’s and his eventual exile to Vienna. I have always been interested in this time period and to read a first account which was not focused just on the Holocaust was a treat. Mehring goes through many “jaunts” and describes second hand book stores with such alliterations I feel like I am there.
After reading this book I feel I have found a comrade in arms as Mehring and I have the same philosophy. I am addicted to reading.
4 Stars
Merhing tells the tale of burning his own books, his interment by the Nazi’s and his eventual exile to Vienna. I have always been interested in this time period and to read a first account which was not focused just on the Holocaust was a treat. Mehring goes through many “jaunts” and describes second hand book stores with such alliterations I feel like I am there.
After reading this book I feel I have found a comrade in arms as Mehring and I have the same philosophy. I am addicted to reading.
4 Stars
September 16, 2015
Gelezen in de Nederlandse vertaling verschenen bij Uitgeverij Voltaire.
De ondertitel geeft het een beetje aan: het is de biografie van de verloren gegane bibliotheek van zijn vader en later van zijn eigen bibliotheek.
Gevlucht voor de Nazi’s, eerst naar Wenen, daarna naar Frankrijk en van daaruit naar Amerika.
Zeer hoge graad aan name-dropping (van schrijvers en kunstenaars), maar niet uit ijdelheid; Mehring heeft een verhaal te vertellen, zijn punt is eigenlijk: al die boeken en wijsheid hebben de gruwelen van 2 wereldoorlogen niet kunnen voorkomen, noch de vernietigingskampen van de Nazi’s of van de Communisten in Rusland; wat is dan nog de zin of betekenis van al die cultuur, wat moeten we dan nog met die boeken?
Mehring is een zeer welbespraakte, zijn zinnen uiterst precies formulerende schrijver, wat echter met de hoge dosering namen die voorbij komt, soms vermoeiend wordt.
Men dient dit boek in niet al te grote porties tot zich te nemen en voor wie niet ongeveer dezelfde canon aan boeken gelezen heeft, zijn er weinig referentiepunten, denk ik. Als je die achtergrond wel hebt, valt er veel te genieten, zeker ook in de meer anekdotische passages over Joseph Roth of Rilke bijvoorbeeld.
Leuk is ook zijn interpretatie van Proust, als een solipsistische voetnoot bij de Comedie Humaine van Balzac, die in de schildering van de monsters van de Beau Monde van het fin de siecle Parijs al de voorafschaduwing ziet van de monsters die het Derde Rijk zal baren.
De ondertitel geeft het een beetje aan: het is de biografie van de verloren gegane bibliotheek van zijn vader en later van zijn eigen bibliotheek.
Gevlucht voor de Nazi’s, eerst naar Wenen, daarna naar Frankrijk en van daaruit naar Amerika.
Zeer hoge graad aan name-dropping (van schrijvers en kunstenaars), maar niet uit ijdelheid; Mehring heeft een verhaal te vertellen, zijn punt is eigenlijk: al die boeken en wijsheid hebben de gruwelen van 2 wereldoorlogen niet kunnen voorkomen, noch de vernietigingskampen van de Nazi’s of van de Communisten in Rusland; wat is dan nog de zin of betekenis van al die cultuur, wat moeten we dan nog met die boeken?
Mehring is een zeer welbespraakte, zijn zinnen uiterst precies formulerende schrijver, wat echter met de hoge dosering namen die voorbij komt, soms vermoeiend wordt.
Men dient dit boek in niet al te grote porties tot zich te nemen en voor wie niet ongeveer dezelfde canon aan boeken gelezen heeft, zijn er weinig referentiepunten, denk ik. Als je die achtergrond wel hebt, valt er veel te genieten, zeker ook in de meer anekdotische passages over Joseph Roth of Rilke bijvoorbeeld.
Leuk is ook zijn interpretatie van Proust, als een solipsistische voetnoot bij de Comedie Humaine van Balzac, die in de schildering van de monsters van de Beau Monde van het fin de siecle Parijs al de voorafschaduwing ziet van de monsters die het Derde Rijk zal baren.
September 7, 2023
I believe I came across this book as it was mentioned while reading THE ORIENTALIST by Tom Reiss OR ORIENTALISM by Edward W Said. In any case, I loved the title and decided to buy the book.
The book is written by Walter Mehring who was born in Berlin in 1896 and died in Zurich in 1981. It’s about recollecting the lost library of his father. He inherited his father’s respect for literature and many of the books in his father’s library were rejected by the Nationalist Socialist Party. Many of his father’s books were destroyed and even Walters’s books were burned, and he was forced to roam Europe as a literary fugitive. He avoided capture but his library was confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis.
In this book he delves into his mind to remember the many books and the excerpts from them.
After reading I researched to see if a movie was ever made about the author. Coincidentally, there is a 2023 Limited series on Netflix called TRANSATLANTIC. Walter is a featured cast member, so guess what I’m watching next.
Well, this book was boring in parts, but I was riveted at the ending of the book. And if I didn't read it, I would never have found the following lines that captured me the most:
A man can become as addicted to reading as to any other intoxicant. That is especially true for Europeans, who from a long heritage are as dangerously given to books as they are to alcohol. You reach for a book as you do for a drink, to escape the depressing banality of newspaper headlines, to wash away the disgusting aftertaste known as Contemporary Civilization.
My father believed in general in a hierarchy of intellect, both in the world of books and the world of nature. Man, as the most intelligent mammal, was on top.
“The soul of a nation is expressed in its literature,” my father used to say.
He believed with all his being that words were equivalent to deeds.
“When someone thinks and can no longer impart his thoughts to others, that is the cruelest of all tortures.” --Oscar Panizza, THE COUNCIL OF LOVE, a play about a Renaissance Pope afflicted with venereal disease but its real subject was the contamination of all earthly authority.
It fogged his brain—but that was not the worst of it.
Swedenberg’s descriptions of hells are states of mind. Seek it and you will solve many a riddle.
If there is anything at all worthwhile in our existence, it is falling in love; and if there is any goal left, that goal is falling in love with beauty.
One may reject all books, but one never escapes from one’s dream library, as one never escapes from anything that has once been an obsession.
When the human self is silenced by his pain, a God gave ME the gift to tell of mine. --Goethe
“We are all under sentence of Death...Our one chance lies in expending that interval, in setting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.” --Walter Pater, the critic-philosopher
In the European cafes more books, and often greater ones, have been planned than are housed in all the libraries of the world put together==and more deeds than have bene committed in world history.” --Thomas Babington Macaulay, HISTORY OF ENGLAND
“It was easier for a man to change his opinions than to change his café.”--Aurelian Scholl
Coffee had become the “literary beverage” as Balzac called it.
RETROGRESSING...the vicious circle turns once more upon itself.
The way men think in the mass is totally different from their psychology as individuals.
“Reason without imagination gives birth to impossible, useless ideas.” -Goya (The opposite is also true: Imagination without reason brings forth monstrosities also.)
Ever since the whole world has become enlightened, it has been getting gloomier and gloomier.
Our worst calamity is the loss of humor. That accounts for the epidemic of suicides among writers.
Where once many roads led to ROME, all highways now lead to the factory, the laboratory or the concentration camp. Nobody knows what the laws governing existence are; nobody knows what actually matters.
“The highest good for human creatures still is personality.” -Goethe’s view
“Mind determines existence.” ---- “Existence determines mind.”
The true bride is the shining, tenderly oiled machine. Her thighs are pistons, her womb is a tank, and her lust is velocity.
When I began this history of my father’s library I turned to the books, and it is with books that I must continue. Isn’t there something in modern literature, something somewhere, that will rejuvenate the heart, that breathes an air of pure sensual pleasure?
“There's’ the trouble. Men have most of them got their sex in their heads nowadays, and nowhere else. They start all their deeper reactions in their heads, and work themselves from the top downward, which of course brings disgust, because you’re only having yourself all the time; no matter what other individual you take as a machine-a-plaisir, you’re only taking yourself all that time.” --D.H. Lawrence in a letter he once wrote.
What pleasures us in our reading is our meeting again with familiar figures out of our pasts.
“A great writer is a man who is not ashamed, who does not blush over the humbug of his profession.”
“I judge all writers by their ability to achieve suffering...by the fact that he too has suffered, and if you do not want to express your sufferings, why are you writing at all?”
What worried Shakespeare is what dreams may come because we are thinking creatures. Imagination is a realm where thoughts and feelings are free and equal, where every ego, no matter how insignificant, is one with the supreme personality.
The book is written by Walter Mehring who was born in Berlin in 1896 and died in Zurich in 1981. It’s about recollecting the lost library of his father. He inherited his father’s respect for literature and many of the books in his father’s library were rejected by the Nationalist Socialist Party. Many of his father’s books were destroyed and even Walters’s books were burned, and he was forced to roam Europe as a literary fugitive. He avoided capture but his library was confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis.
In this book he delves into his mind to remember the many books and the excerpts from them.
After reading I researched to see if a movie was ever made about the author. Coincidentally, there is a 2023 Limited series on Netflix called TRANSATLANTIC. Walter is a featured cast member, so guess what I’m watching next.
Well, this book was boring in parts, but I was riveted at the ending of the book. And if I didn't read it, I would never have found the following lines that captured me the most:
A man can become as addicted to reading as to any other intoxicant. That is especially true for Europeans, who from a long heritage are as dangerously given to books as they are to alcohol. You reach for a book as you do for a drink, to escape the depressing banality of newspaper headlines, to wash away the disgusting aftertaste known as Contemporary Civilization.
My father believed in general in a hierarchy of intellect, both in the world of books and the world of nature. Man, as the most intelligent mammal, was on top.
“The soul of a nation is expressed in its literature,” my father used to say.
He believed with all his being that words were equivalent to deeds.
“When someone thinks and can no longer impart his thoughts to others, that is the cruelest of all tortures.” --Oscar Panizza, THE COUNCIL OF LOVE, a play about a Renaissance Pope afflicted with venereal disease but its real subject was the contamination of all earthly authority.
It fogged his brain—but that was not the worst of it.
Swedenberg’s descriptions of hells are states of mind. Seek it and you will solve many a riddle.
If there is anything at all worthwhile in our existence, it is falling in love; and if there is any goal left, that goal is falling in love with beauty.
One may reject all books, but one never escapes from one’s dream library, as one never escapes from anything that has once been an obsession.
When the human self is silenced by his pain, a God gave ME the gift to tell of mine. --Goethe
“We are all under sentence of Death...Our one chance lies in expending that interval, in setting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.” --Walter Pater, the critic-philosopher
In the European cafes more books, and often greater ones, have been planned than are housed in all the libraries of the world put together==and more deeds than have bene committed in world history.” --Thomas Babington Macaulay, HISTORY OF ENGLAND
“It was easier for a man to change his opinions than to change his café.”--Aurelian Scholl
Coffee had become the “literary beverage” as Balzac called it.
RETROGRESSING...the vicious circle turns once more upon itself.
The way men think in the mass is totally different from their psychology as individuals.
“Reason without imagination gives birth to impossible, useless ideas.” -Goya (The opposite is also true: Imagination without reason brings forth monstrosities also.)
Ever since the whole world has become enlightened, it has been getting gloomier and gloomier.
Our worst calamity is the loss of humor. That accounts for the epidemic of suicides among writers.
Where once many roads led to ROME, all highways now lead to the factory, the laboratory or the concentration camp. Nobody knows what the laws governing existence are; nobody knows what actually matters.
“The highest good for human creatures still is personality.” -Goethe’s view
“Mind determines existence.” ---- “Existence determines mind.”
The true bride is the shining, tenderly oiled machine. Her thighs are pistons, her womb is a tank, and her lust is velocity.
When I began this history of my father’s library I turned to the books, and it is with books that I must continue. Isn’t there something in modern literature, something somewhere, that will rejuvenate the heart, that breathes an air of pure sensual pleasure?
“There's’ the trouble. Men have most of them got their sex in their heads nowadays, and nowhere else. They start all their deeper reactions in their heads, and work themselves from the top downward, which of course brings disgust, because you’re only having yourself all the time; no matter what other individual you take as a machine-a-plaisir, you’re only taking yourself all that time.” --D.H. Lawrence in a letter he once wrote.
What pleasures us in our reading is our meeting again with familiar figures out of our pasts.
“A great writer is a man who is not ashamed, who does not blush over the humbug of his profession.”
“I judge all writers by their ability to achieve suffering...by the fact that he too has suffered, and if you do not want to express your sufferings, why are you writing at all?”
What worried Shakespeare is what dreams may come because we are thinking creatures. Imagination is a realm where thoughts and feelings are free and equal, where every ego, no matter how insignificant, is one with the supreme personality.
January 30, 2019
Very good . interesting story as well as suggestion for further reading.
written under sad conditions by a Jewish man escaping the nazis and his fathers library left in his hands
written under sad conditions by a Jewish man escaping the nazis and his fathers library left in his hands
May 11, 2015
So disappointing....parts of this book were very good, but overall it was not as interesting as it sounded.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews