Hannover Municipal Library restitutes book belonging to Meinhardt Lemke

In July 2025 Hannover Municipal Library returned a valuable book from the estate of Meinhardt Lemke to his heirs. The work, Voltaire’s Geschichte Karls XII. Königs von Schweden (Zwickau: Schumann 1821), has since found a new home in New York.

Meinhardt Lemke was born in 1904 in Fordon, the son of Leopold Lemke, a merchant and cantor of the Jewish community, and his wife Clara, née Held. He grew up in Tilsit and Königsberg in East Prussia. After studying German literature, philosophy and art history in Breslau and Berlin, he published poems and short stories in newspapers and on the radio at an early stage. From 1932 onwards he worked as an assistant librarian at the University Library in Breslau, later moving to the university archives. Following the Nazi takeover, he was persecuted as a Jew and was dismissed from his post in 1933, probably under the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service”.

He then found employment at the library of the Breslau Jewish Community. At the same time he began studying Jewish history and Judaica at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau. In the wake of the November Pogroms of 1938, numerous teachers and students from the seminary were deported to Buchenwald concentration camp, among them Lemke. He contracted open tuberculosis while he was there. After five weeks’ imprisonment he was released on condition that he leave the German Reich.

Lemke managed to escape to Bolivia in 1939 and settled in La Paz, where he worked as a teacher at the Jewish school and was active in the Jewish community and in German émigré organisations. At the turn of 1944/45 he left Bolivia for the United States, where his mother and sisters had fled previously. He lived in New York from then on, working as a machinist and office assistant, while continuing to publish poems in German-language newspapers. Meinhardt Lemke died in 1962 in New York as a result of his lung disease.

Hannover Municipal Library purchased Lemke’s book from the antiquarian bookseller Ludwig Röhrscheid in Bonn in 1944. It is thought to have been confiscated in 1938 at the time of his arrest, taken along with other book holdings from Breslau to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin, from where it probably entered the antiquarian book market.

Hannover Municipal Library has been conducting provenance research into its holdings since 2017 to identify Nazi-looted books. The central aim of this work, funded by the German Lost Art Foundation, is to return books seized during the Nazi period to their rightful owners.

For more on the provenance research projects being conducted by Hannover Municipal Library:

• NS-Raubgut in der Stadtbibliothek Hannover – ein Projekt zur Erbenermittlung und der Suche nach fairen und gerechten Lösungen [Nazi-looted books in Hannover Municipal Library – a project on identifying heirs and finding fair and just solutions] (2025)
• Stadtbibliothek Hannover – eine Wissenschaftliche Stadtbibliothek und ihre zweifelhaften Erwerbungen in der Zeit 1933 bis 1945 [Stadtbibliothek Hannover – an academic municipal library and its dubious acquisitions in the period 1933 to 1945] (October 2020 – February 2025)
• Zweifelhafte Provenienzen im Bestand der Stadtbibliothek Hannover [Dubious provenances in the holdings of Hannover Municipal Library] (August 2017 – July 2018, August 2018 – July 2019, October 2019 – October 2020)

Meinhardt Lemke’s restituted book is also listed in the provenance database Looted Cultural Assets: Voltaire: Geschichte Karls XII. Königs von Schweden. Zwickau: Schumann 1821. Voltaire’s biography of the Swedish king Charles XII is now with Lemke’s descendants in New York.