Duchess Anna Amalia Library, Weimar
“A historical building first of all needs to be understood”
Architect Walther Grunwald on his restoration of the Anna Amalia Library
Renovating a historic building is always daunting – all the more so when the building in question is a centuries-old, world-famous cradle of German Classicism. But the restorers of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library were undeterred, and succeeded not only in painstakingly reconstructing Weimar’s unique library after its devastating fire, but also in bringing it up to modern technical standards.
Absurd though it may seem, one of Germany’s most ambitious, costly and complex restoration projects may have ultimately been the result of a faulty electric cable. On the evening of 2 September 2004, a fire broke out in the roof of the duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar that, according to subsequent findings by the German Federal Criminal Agency, is most likely to have been caused by a smouldering electric cable. News of the fire spread almost as quickly as the flames themselves, which quickly moved down to the upper floors of the building. The history of the library stretchers right back to the middle of the 16th century.
The five-storey palace was initially built as a residence for Duke Johann Wilhelm, and became known as the “Green Palace” (Grünes Schlösschen), probably because of the copper on its roof. It was not until 1766, during the regency of Anna Amalia, Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach – after whom the library is named today – that the ducal book collection was moved there. The fame of the library is partly thanks to its opulent, three-storey-high rococo hall, which is decorated with a large oil painting of Duke Carl August.
But what has contributed most of all to the popularity of the library is the identity of its librarian – a certain Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who headed the library up until the time of his death in 1832, during which time he expanded the collection to make it one of the most important in Germany. At Goethe’s instigation, on the basis of drawings by Heinrich Gentz, a connecting structure was built between 1803 and 1805 linking the “Green Palace” with an old tower on its south side. During the 35 years of Goethe’s directorship, the library’s collection doubled to 120,000 volumes. At the time of the fire the duchess Anna Amalia Library, with approximately one million volumes, was one of the most significant Weimar classicist collections in existence.
Some 50,000 of those treasures went up in flames that night. During the 67 hours of firefighting by the Weimar fire brigade, a further 62,000 volumes were damaged, in some cases severely, by flames and water. To safeguard them against mould, the damaged books and documents were rushed to the Leipzig Centre for Book Preservation, where they were frozen to –20 °C and restored, one item at a time. The damage suffered by the building itself was similarly devastating. During the firefighting operation some 380,000 litres of water had been pumped onto the roof of the library, of which at least 50,000 litres had penetrated into the masonry, with some seeping right down to the basement. Water had collected in cavities above the plastering and then either dripped out through cracks, or appeared on the surface as brown stains. Wooden banisters, ceilings and shelving had also been severely damaged by flames and water.
A restoration expert was therefore required who could combine exceptional technical skill with supreme care. Such a person was found: Walther Grunwald, a Berlin-based architect and specialist in working with historical buildings. In as far back as the 1970s, Grunwald had converted a 700-year-old former bakery in Cuers in France, which to this day features on a list of the 100 best restored buildings in France. Over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, Grunwald restored historic castles, late nineteenth to early twentieth century office buildings, and the crypt of the French Cathedral on Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt. “One must understand a building in terms of its underlying history of ideas before one can successfully restore it,” explains the architect. Grunwald, who is now 72 years old, has not once in his life built a new building.
Grunwald’s work on the duchess Anna Amalia Library – or rather, what remained of it – began with the drying of the building. 50 heating rods, each with an output of 50 kW, heated the saturated library for 10 weeks until it was at last possible to begin the actual restoration and conversion work. Grunwald brought back many features that had been hidden for centuries. He exposed the remains of the initial kitchen, which included a well, and resurrected storage and preparation rooms and the remains of a spiral staircase that led directly into the dining hall. But at the same time he was extremely cautious in modernising the building’s historic treasures. Obvious changes included installing a lift and an automatic high-pressure fogging system, and extending the area of the old plant rooms from 58 to 461 square metres. “Behind its beautiful decorations, the duchess Anna Amalia Library today is a highly complex machine that in every way meets the requirements of a modern library building,” explains Grunwald proudly. The ”Berker Glasserie”, the light switch used throughout the library, is symbolic of the building’s perfect synthesis of history and modernity.
Bringing the building back to life after the fire cost almost € 13 million in total, with almost 20,000 citizens donating to the reconstruction. On 24 October 2007, the 268th birthday of the duchess whose name the library bears, the duchess Anna Amalia Library was reopened by Horst Köhler, the German Federal President at that time. However, it will be some time before the last of the library’s former residents are able to return home: according to current estimates, restoration of the large number of fire-damaged books will not be completed until 2015.