A burned library in a ruined city, civilian victims of shelling by a ruthless invader, a policy of occupation including linguistic censorship, the deportation and internment of professors teaching in the vernacular, condemnations by the international community: today all this might sound like the description of Russia’s war against Ukraine, or perhaps Nazi Germany’s policies in the General government of occupied Poland during the Second World War. But the scene I sketched comes from the First World War, when Germany invaded Belgium, leading to the burning of the old library of Leuven and the occupation of Flanders. 

During the early days of the First World War, the library of Leuven suffered a devastating loss of 300,000 valuable manuscripts and books. This event revealed the ruthless nature of the war and had a profound impact on both Belgium and Germany. But it also had severe repercussions for Germany, as the invader and occupier. Its reputation as a leader of European civilization was destroyed, which was highlighted in the reparation settlements outlined in the Versailles Peace treaty.

The events at Leuven affected not only states, but also professional associations. It turned librarians into significant actors in foreign policy during Europe’s political transition. Libraries had long been integral to Germany’s national identity. During the Napoleonic wars, Germany’s knowledge infrastructure with one of its centrepieces, the Prussian Library Catalogue, had grown in response to a previous defeat. In the First World War, librarians played a crucial role in organizing knowledge. In occupied Belgium, Prussian royal librarian Fritz Milkau was appointed by the German government to form a special library committee to assess the impact of the occupation on libraries. German foreign policy-makers also sought connections with Nikolai Rubakin, an exiled Russian librarian and propaganda theorist in Switzerland, who collaborated with the German government to educate Russian soldiers in Prisoner of War camps. Germany’s choice to work with Rubakin, rather than another prominent librarian, Lyubov’ Khavkina from Kharkov in the Russian empire, who the American Library Association saw as the future of a postimperial Russia, reflected an interest in destabilizing the former Russian empire rather than supporting a viable successor. Germany’s library policies differed in the East and West, except in Poland, where they facilitated the emergence of a (buffer) nation-state and with it, the growth of the Polish national library. Marian Łodyński, a Polish military librarian, played a significant role in reorganizing national military libraries and shaping Polish national librarianship.

German librarians in Germany were also affected by the war. Alongside libraries that collected war records, unique library foundations emerged as tools of post-war reconciliation. Perhaps most famously, Aby Warburg, an art historian, founded a library focused on the cultural history of Europe since Antiquity, aiming to connect seemingly disparate subjects under the motto of a common European memory.

In 1921, Emperor Hirohito of Japan visited the ruins of the Leuven library, symbolizing Japan’s emergence as a new global power, alongside the United States’ contribution to reconstructing the library. Between 1916 and 1918, Germany’s role had shifted from a world power seeking to foster revolution in Russia to a defeated nation witnessing regime changes under rising US hegemony. However, the Nazi takeover in 1933 and the outbreak of the Second World War brought an end to the interwar normalization of German library work and its international partners. The Third Reich systematically burned books domestically and destroyed libraries abroad, particularly on the eastern front, on a scale that exceeded the events at Leuven by a large factor. In China, too, under Emperor Hirohito, over 4000 libraries were destroyed during the Japanese occupation.

We are used to thinking of modern warfare as a conflict which increasingly spills out into the sphere of culture, education, and media, calling it ‘hybrid’. Yet a brief look at libraries in the First World War shows that many of these ‘hybrid’ features were already present then and in the subsequent war.

Librarians as Agents of German Foreign Policy and the Cultural Consequences of the First World War by Dina Gusejnova