Christoph Cobet, a German scholar and antiquarian bookman who became fascinated with the period, recognized that its relatively brief duration made a well-defined documentation project conceivable. His goal was to collect every piece of the written word published in Germany or by Germans in exile, or translated into German, during the years 1945-1950. The collection, considered to be virtually complete in 1983, was purchased by the University of Texas Libraries, with the cooperation of the Department of Germanic Languages and the College of Liberal Arts. It supplements an already strong collection in Germanic literature, languages, and intellectual history, contained in the Perry-Castañeda Library, the main graduate research library for the humanities at the University.
Consisting of some 4,000+ titles, including over 100 periodicals, the Cobet Collection contains many works produced in extremely limited editions almost inaccessible even to the book trade of that time. Now, they are even more difficult to locate. Reflections of contemporary German thought and endeavor (literature, history, sociology, economics, law, education, philosophy, art, architecture, and theater), these assembled books and journals offer contextual support and illumination to the study of Germany as it struggled to understand its recent past and fashion a new identity during the post-war years.
The collection is housed permanently in the Collections Deposit Library at the University of Texas at Austin, and is a completely non-circulating collection because of its fragility. All items receive full cataloging and are listed in the University of Texas Libraries' on-line catalog. For the cost of the copying fees, some materials may be acquired through inter-library service; however, for large-scale or long-term research projects, this is probably not feasible, given the size of the collection.
For information, contact:
Jim Holmes, Germanic
Languages Bibliographer/Cataloger
The University of Texas Libraries
Cataloging Department, PCL 2.300
512-495-4181
Austin, Texas, 78713-7330
Related Information
· Research by Subject:
German Language and Literature
