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The volumes of Brothers Grimm fairy tales found here were german. And they were found in Poland, because some of todays Poland was Germany, and most of the know

The volumes of Brothers Grimm fairy tales found here were german. And they were found in Poland, because some of todays Poland was Germany, and most of the knowledge lost in the war in todays Poland was actually knowledge of german culture and heritage, when the Soviets invaded from the east and burned down all the houses and libraries. Millions of Germans fled and died, and with this large amounts of german knowledge has been lost forever. In this case, due to some luck, some works survived. Edit: "some", not "most".

throw_pm23 2y ago
It's not like all this has happened in vacuum though. Some context is missing from your observation.
- michael9423 2y ago
  nothing in history happens in a vacuum. But as a matter of fact, when the Soviets invaded Germany from the east, what got lost was mostly german knowledge in the destruction and burnings.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    When they invaded Germany proper, sure. But that was after the Germans had already destroyed countless Polish cultural treasures over the previous five years. And of course that’s not even mentioning the Russification and Germanization programs that aimed to destroy Polish culture and knowledge during the Partitions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_culture_during_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_culture_during_World_Wa... https://www.bn.org.pl/en/news/3855-75-years-ago-the-germans-set-fire-to-the-national-library-in-warsaw.html https://www.bn.org.pl/en/news/3855-75-years-ago-the-germans-...
    - michael9423 2y ago
      Yes indeed. When governments lead wars against each other, it is the populations that suffer, and knowledge and culture get destroyed on all sides.
      - keiferski 2y ago
        Characterizing the invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union as “governments leading wars against each other” is sloppy revisionism at best. Poland was invaded by occupying powers.
        mistrial9 2y ago
        Polish heavy cavalry was entirely innocent for a thousand years?
        keiferski 2y ago
        That has what to do with WW2, exactly?
        mistrial9 2y ago
        start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Poland
        michael9423 2y ago
        All war is state terror. As the great Sebastian Haffner wrote: "European history knows two forms of terror. The first is the uncontrollable explosion of bloodlust in a victorious mass uprising. The other is cold, calculated cruelty committed by a victorious state as a demonstration of power and intimidation. The two forms of terror normally correspond to revolution and repression. The first is revolutionary. It justifies itself by the rage and fever of the moment, a temporary madness. The second is repressive. It justifies itself by the preceding revolutionary atrocities."
        keiferski 2y ago
        Nice quote, but I'm not sure how it relates to my comment.
- Amezarak 2y ago
  You're quite right about that, but it is true that the post-WW borders of Germany viz. Poland were a little ridiculous, and the Allies after WWII undertook a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing after the war against territories that had had major German populations for centuries in an effort to create ethnically homogeneous states.
  - alkyon 2y ago
    It's worth remebering though that this was Stalin's plan to enlarge the Soviet Union (incidently also approved by the Western powers in the Yalta Agreement) at the cost of German territory. The expulsion of some millions of Poles from the territories of some newly created Soviet republics that now belong to Western Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania is just as well a striking example of campaign of ethnic cleansing against the territories that had major Polish population for centuries. Morover, the Western Poland was subject to Prussian ethnic cleansing policies for more than a century, not to mention the war itself.
  - hnbad 2y ago
    The national myth of Germany actually obscures one of the biggest successful efforts in "restructuring" the Allies engaged in: the complete elimination of Prussia. Not only were parts of Eastern Prussia reassigned to other countries but also Prussian provinces within Germany were dissolved and remodeled into the German Bundesländer. Today "Prussia" as a cohesive identity largely only exists as something for Bavarians to differentiate themselves from. Well into WW1 German national identity was defined more by Prussia than anything else but the Allies completely eliminated it. Denazification was largely a farce and appeals by influential people were mostly rubberstamped but Deprussification is the secret success story.
- zqna 2y ago
  It didn't help that in Poland was an aggresive country in 1930s too, and was waging aggressive wars against its neighbours (read, "Lithuania"), and occupying and bruttaly polonizing what was never its ever. Not too say that Lithuania was not run by own nationalists, who also managed to get into military conflicts with Latvian "brothers". The moral is that the whole Europe was boiling in every own nationalism that culminated with WW2. Thinking that it can never repeat is as delusional as 100 years ago
  - hnbad 2y ago
    Nationalism truly was the mindkiller that enabled WW1 and WW2. It's important to remember that although WW2 is rightfully remembered for the Holocaust, it was in essence an attempt at a European colonialism by Germany coupled with a Germanic ethno-nationalism (or more accurately: völkisch nationalism, which is still deeply entrenched today). The racist pseudoscience of the Germanic übermensch served the same purpose as the skull measuring scientific racism used to justify the enslavement and extermination of the native population in African colonies. "Lebensraum" was just a Germanized version of Manifest Destiny. The colonization of Africa, India and the Americas involved massive displacement of natives and mass killings that at least colloquially can best be described as genocides. Much the same way as forests were cleared to create farmland, native populations were cleared to create "living space" for settlers. Much like natural resources were exploited and brought back home, natives were used for manual labor until they were used up. Nationalism allowed leaders to use a national identity to rally their subjects against their neighbors. In an act of massive hubris and severe underestimation of technological advancements this nationalist fervor led to the mass death event that was WW1. WW2 in turn built on this but also brought colonialism home with the explicit goal of not only redrawing borders but also repurposing the land and eliminating any natives standing in the way. I.e. Poland may have engaged in nationalist assimilation in the form of Polonizing Lithuania but Germany explicitly wanted to remove anyone not part of the "volk", at the barrel of a gun if necessary.
surfingdino 2y ago
"Most" is a bit of a stretch, but then it's hard to keep up with the territorial changes in that part of the world, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Polan... As for those poor Germans who had to flee... a lot of those lands were captured during partitions of Poland, but no other that Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, and Russia. No love lost there.
- fch42 2y ago
  Thing is, European Countries before the Napoleonic Age were quite a bit "intertwined"; Several times between ~1400 ... 1700, Polish (or shall I say, Polish-Lithuanian?) Royalty also ruled Bohemia, Hungary, Wallonia (modern Romania), Sweden, almost got there in Moscow during "the Troubles", while at other times the German / Central European Wettin (Saxony) or Luxemburg (Bohemia) families also held the Polish Crown. Nevermind military alliances (Jan Sobieski's contributions to to lifting the Turkish Siege of Vienna in 1683 got him a memorial in the sky to this day ... the constellation of Scutum). The way to become King of Poland was not quite as elaborately ritualized as the German electorate, but not generally/universally hereditary either. But neither did Poland isolate itself from its neighbours, on the contrary. Up until internal strife and the great Nordic War, it involved itself a lot with both central and eastern Europe. And while one may look at the partitions as predatory, let's also remember that for 80 years before the Polish Duma flogged the crown to the highest bidder (August the nth of Saxony, for three generations), which, and realize it's a strong word, also sold the country. Let's remember "predatory" territorial expansions also a little in context; Turkey overrunning the Balkans and Hungary between 1300..1526 eradicated a dozen countries. Louis XIV's wars of reunion were very predatory and gained France territory the size of Switzerland. The Austria-Turkey wars after 1683 "undid" 200 years of Turkish rule in Hungary within two decades, as did Russia taking over the Cossack Hetmanates, Crimea; the wars of the Spanish and Austrian succession changed territorial "ownership" on a large scale as well. What Napoleon, in league with quite a few of the German states, did to "countries" in Germany was neither less disruptive nor, territory-wise, smaller in scale than the partitions of Poland. That doesn't make them "right". I would contest though that they were a "uniquely polish" sort of doom. Other countries lost their independence for centuries as well (Serbia, Hungary, Bohemia/Czechy, Lithuania if you like ...). The difference "then" was that such changes in overlordship only began to be associated with forceful removals of population - ethical cleansing - after the rise of nationalism post Napoleon. My country (Germany) did rather evil there, and can't blame others for having taken retribution. No need for "love lost". It's not deserved. The real evil was less the partitions and the "ganging up" on Poland, but the nationalism in the 19th century. The idea that within your country's boundaries, there shall be one language, one culture. It'd have been considered very odd up to ~1700 for sure. And it created all the evil between 1780 and 1945. Looking at Russia trying to eradicate Ukraine, maybe ... to this day. And yet, it's all _shared_ history.
rich_sasha 2y ago
Funnily enough a lot of Polish art was "lost" during WWII. Every now and then it resurfaces from someone's "private collection" in Germany. German government is kind enough to let Poles bid for the art they carelessly lost during that affair in the 1940s. If it is for sale, that is - much of it isn't. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looting_of_Poland_in_World_War_II https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looting_of_Poland_in_World_W...
- michael9423 2y ago
  Not only in Germany. Poland got looted by the Nazis and Soviets from both sides.
  - rich_sasha 2y ago
    And that somehow changes the merit of the argument?
    - michael9423 2y ago
      Which argument specifically? Your sarcastic overtone make it difficult to detect an actual argument. Your general remark that Polish art disappeared from Poland is true. Your implication that only Germany was responsible for that is wrong. The german state is generally cooperative, in contrast to the ex-soviet states, in giving back and trying to find solutions. Even from the private side is cooperation - some time ago some private owner gave back art to Poland, which rarely happens. You did not provide a source for your claim that "German government is kind enough to let Poles bid for the art they carelessly lost".
- lifestyleguru 2y ago
  My favorite German proverb is "children are not responsible for the crimes of their parents".
  - praptak 2y ago
    Doesn't work as a response to "this was robbed from my grandfather, you should give it back because benefitting from crime is generally bad".
mzs 2y ago
Oh some German books were burned, while most of Poland's then inteligencia lie in a mass grave courtesy said Russians.
jakubadamw 2y ago
> and most of the knowledge lost in the war in todays Poland was actually knowledge of german culture and heritage Wow. It sounds like you have a grossly misinformed view of this part of the world, with a clear sense of superiority of one culture over the other. So, here's a few facts for you: > Most likely on October 12-13, 1944, the Brandkommando of the Wehrmacht (Nazi German army) burned collections of the most valuable literary monuments from the National Library in one of the greatest losses to Polish culture in its history, and one of the greatest losses to written culture in history of the world. The National Library lost at least 39,000 manuscripts – and most likely more, perhaps as many as 50,000 – along with some 80,000 books from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, 100,000 books from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 60,000 drawings and engravings, 25,000 musical scores and 10,000 maps. The great family libraries were almost wiped out, such as the famous collection of manuscripts of the Krasiński Library, of which just 78 volumes survived out of more than 7,000.¹ ¹ https://www.bn.org.pl/en/news/3855-75-years-ago-the-germans-set-fire-to-the-national-library-in-warsaw.html https://www.bn.org.pl/en/news/3855-75-years-ago-the-germans-...
- michael9423 2y ago
  > Mr. Garber, the Second World War was also an inferno for German book and library culture. Do we now know more or less exactly what damage and losses occurred at which collection locations in Germany? > Yes, most of the damage is known and extends across the entire old German Reich, from Karlsruhe to Kiel, from Munich to Königsberg. The largest German library in the Reich was hit most spectacularly. In July 1943, the Hamburg City Library alone lost 700,000 volumes in “Aktion Gomorrha”. As far as the individual titles themselves are concerned, the relevant data is often still missing - unfortunately. There is no large and accurate work on the books and libraries that once existed and were lost or not returned during the Second World War. > How do you assess the historical and intellectual damage caused to our cultural memory by the absence of German books? > I will answer this question with a quote from the first expert on the subject from 1947: “It is a catastrophe that has no comparison in the history of libraries and in the history of science” (Georg Leyh). We have no account of the demise of German libraries. Germany has lost significant parts of its cultural memory forever. But who knows about it? Conversely, the greatest crime committed by Germany has led to an irretrievable loss of urban silhouettes and cultural witnesses. The answer? Never-ending mourning and never-ending work of remembrance. https://www.fr.de/kultur/literatur/eine-katastrophe-11007951.html https://www.fr.de/kultur/literatur/eine-katastrophe-11007951... Generally, the cultural loss via burning down libraries and knowledge is inherent to war, and obviously does not only affect one country. The article also mentions the Library of Warsaw as an example of lost knowledge, but the loss of german culture "has no comparison in the history of libraries", per renowned librarian Georg Leyh. P.S.: Germany still does not own the Berlinka - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlinka_(art_collection) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlinka_(art_collection)

throw_pm23 2y ago

It's not like all this has happened in vacuum though. Some context is missing from your observation.

michael9423 2y ago
nothing in history happens in a vacuum. But as a matter of fact, when the Soviets invaded Germany from the east, what got lost was mostly german knowledge in the destruction and burnings.
- keiferski 2y ago
  When they invaded Germany proper, sure. But that was after the Germans had already destroyed countless Polish cultural treasures over the previous five years. And of course that’s not even mentioning the Russification and Germanization programs that aimed to destroy Polish culture and knowledge during the Partitions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_culture_during_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_culture_during_World_Wa... https://www.bn.org.pl/en/news/3855-75-years-ago-the-germans-set-fire-to-the-national-library-in-warsaw.html https://www.bn.org.pl/en/news/3855-75-years-ago-the-germans-...
  - michael9423 2y ago
    Yes indeed. When governments lead wars against each other, it is the populations that suffer, and knowledge and culture get destroyed on all sides.
    - keiferski 2y ago
      Characterizing the invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union as “governments leading wars against each other” is sloppy revisionism at best. Poland was invaded by occupying powers.
      - mistrial9 2y ago
        Polish heavy cavalry was entirely innocent for a thousand years?
        keiferski 2y ago
        That has what to do with WW2, exactly?
        mistrial9 2y ago
        start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Poland
      - michael9423 2y ago
        All war is state terror. As the great Sebastian Haffner wrote: "European history knows two forms of terror. The first is the uncontrollable explosion of bloodlust in a victorious mass uprising. The other is cold, calculated cruelty committed by a victorious state as a demonstration of power and intimidation. The two forms of terror normally correspond to revolution and repression. The first is revolutionary. It justifies itself by the rage and fever of the moment, a temporary madness. The second is repressive. It justifies itself by the preceding revolutionary atrocities."
        keiferski 2y ago
        Nice quote, but I'm not sure how it relates to my comment.
Amezarak 2y ago
You're quite right about that, but it is true that the post-WW borders of Germany viz. Poland were a little ridiculous, and the Allies after WWII undertook a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing after the war against territories that had had major German populations for centuries in an effort to create ethnically homogeneous states.
- alkyon 2y ago
  It's worth remebering though that this was Stalin's plan to enlarge the Soviet Union (incidently also approved by the Western powers in the Yalta Agreement) at the cost of German territory. The expulsion of some millions of Poles from the territories of some newly created Soviet republics that now belong to Western Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania is just as well a striking example of campaign of ethnic cleansing against the territories that had major Polish population for centuries. Morover, the Western Poland was subject to Prussian ethnic cleansing policies for more than a century, not to mention the war itself.
- hnbad 2y ago
  The national myth of Germany actually obscures one of the biggest successful efforts in "restructuring" the Allies engaged in: the complete elimination of Prussia. Not only were parts of Eastern Prussia reassigned to other countries but also Prussian provinces within Germany were dissolved and remodeled into the German Bundesländer. Today "Prussia" as a cohesive identity largely only exists as something for Bavarians to differentiate themselves from. Well into WW1 German national identity was defined more by Prussia than anything else but the Allies completely eliminated it. Denazification was largely a farce and appeals by influential people were mostly rubberstamped but Deprussification is the secret success story.
zqna 2y ago
It didn't help that in Poland was an aggresive country in 1930s too, and was waging aggressive wars against its neighbours (read, "Lithuania"), and occupying and bruttaly polonizing what was never its ever. Not too say that Lithuania was not run by own nationalists, who also managed to get into military conflicts with Latvian "brothers". The moral is that the whole Europe was boiling in every own nationalism that culminated with WW2. Thinking that it can never repeat is as delusional as 100 years ago
- hnbad 2y ago
  Nationalism truly was the mindkiller that enabled WW1 and WW2. It's important to remember that although WW2 is rightfully remembered for the Holocaust, it was in essence an attempt at a European colonialism by Germany coupled with a Germanic ethno-nationalism (or more accurately: völkisch nationalism, which is still deeply entrenched today). The racist pseudoscience of the Germanic übermensch served the same purpose as the skull measuring scientific racism used to justify the enslavement and extermination of the native population in African colonies. "Lebensraum" was just a Germanized version of Manifest Destiny. The colonization of Africa, India and the Americas involved massive displacement of natives and mass killings that at least colloquially can best be described as genocides. Much the same way as forests were cleared to create farmland, native populations were cleared to create "living space" for settlers. Much like natural resources were exploited and brought back home, natives were used for manual labor until they were used up. Nationalism allowed leaders to use a national identity to rally their subjects against their neighbors. In an act of massive hubris and severe underestimation of technological advancements this nationalist fervor led to the mass death event that was WW1. WW2 in turn built on this but also brought colonialism home with the explicit goal of not only redrawing borders but also repurposing the land and eliminating any natives standing in the way. I.e. Poland may have engaged in nationalist assimilation in the form of Polonizing Lithuania but Germany explicitly wanted to remove anyone not part of the "volk", at the barrel of a gun if necessary.

surfingdino 2y ago

"Most" is a bit of a stretch, but then it's hard to keep up with the territorial changes in that part of the world, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Polan... As for those poor Germans who had to flee... a lot of those lands were captured during partitions of Poland, but no other that Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, and Russia. No love lost there.

fch42 2y ago
Thing is, European Countries before the Napoleonic Age were quite a bit "intertwined"; Several times between ~1400 ... 1700, Polish (or shall I say, Polish-Lithuanian?) Royalty also ruled Bohemia, Hungary, Wallonia (modern Romania), Sweden, almost got there in Moscow during "the Troubles", while at other times the German / Central European Wettin (Saxony) or Luxemburg (Bohemia) families also held the Polish Crown. Nevermind military alliances (Jan Sobieski's contributions to to lifting the Turkish Siege of Vienna in 1683 got him a memorial in the sky to this day ... the constellation of Scutum). The way to become King of Poland was not quite as elaborately ritualized as the German electorate, but not generally/universally hereditary either. But neither did Poland isolate itself from its neighbours, on the contrary. Up until internal strife and the great Nordic War, it involved itself a lot with both central and eastern Europe. And while one may look at the partitions as predatory, let's also remember that for 80 years before the Polish Duma flogged the crown to the highest bidder (August the nth of Saxony, for three generations), which, and realize it's a strong word, also sold the country. Let's remember "predatory" territorial expansions also a little in context; Turkey overrunning the Balkans and Hungary between 1300..1526 eradicated a dozen countries. Louis XIV's wars of reunion were very predatory and gained France territory the size of Switzerland. The Austria-Turkey wars after 1683 "undid" 200 years of Turkish rule in Hungary within two decades, as did Russia taking over the Cossack Hetmanates, Crimea; the wars of the Spanish and Austrian succession changed territorial "ownership" on a large scale as well. What Napoleon, in league with quite a few of the German states, did to "countries" in Germany was neither less disruptive nor, territory-wise, smaller in scale than the partitions of Poland. That doesn't make them "right". I would contest though that they were a "uniquely polish" sort of doom. Other countries lost their independence for centuries as well (Serbia, Hungary, Bohemia/Czechy, Lithuania if you like ...). The difference "then" was that such changes in overlordship only began to be associated with forceful removals of population - ethical cleansing - after the rise of nationalism post Napoleon. My country (Germany) did rather evil there, and can't blame others for having taken retribution. No need for "love lost". It's not deserved. The real evil was less the partitions and the "ganging up" on Poland, but the nationalism in the 19th century. The idea that within your country's boundaries, there shall be one language, one culture. It'd have been considered very odd up to ~1700 for sure. And it created all the evil between 1780 and 1945. Looking at Russia trying to eradicate Ukraine, maybe ... to this day. And yet, it's all _shared_ history.

rich_sasha 2y ago

Funnily enough a lot of Polish art was "lost" during WWII. Every now and then it resurfaces from someone's "private collection" in Germany. German government is kind enough to let Poles bid for the art they carelessly lost during that affair in the 1940s. If it is for sale, that is - much of it isn't. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looting_of_Poland_in_World_War_II https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looting_of_Poland_in_World_W...

michael9423 2y ago
Not only in Germany. Poland got looted by the Nazis and Soviets from both sides.
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  And that somehow changes the merit of the argument?
  - michael9423 2y ago
    Which argument specifically? Your sarcastic overtone make it difficult to detect an actual argument. Your general remark that Polish art disappeared from Poland is true. Your implication that only Germany was responsible for that is wrong. The german state is generally cooperative, in contrast to the ex-soviet states, in giving back and trying to find solutions. Even from the private side is cooperation - some time ago some private owner gave back art to Poland, which rarely happens. You did not provide a source for your claim that "German government is kind enough to let Poles bid for the art they carelessly lost".
lifestyleguru 2y ago
My favorite German proverb is "children are not responsible for the crimes of their parents".
- praptak 2y ago
  Doesn't work as a response to "this was robbed from my grandfather, you should give it back because benefitting from crime is generally bad".

mzs 2y ago

Oh some German books were burned, while most of Poland's then inteligencia lie in a mass grave courtesy said Russians.

jakubadamw 2y ago

> and most of the knowledge lost in the war in todays Poland was actually knowledge of german culture and heritage Wow. It sounds like you have a grossly misinformed view of this part of the world, with a clear sense of superiority of one culture over the other. So, here's a few facts for you: > Most likely on October 12-13, 1944, the Brandkommando of the Wehrmacht (Nazi German army) burned collections of the most valuable literary monuments from the National Library in one of the greatest losses to Polish culture in its history, and one of the greatest losses to written culture in history of the world. The National Library lost at least 39,000 manuscripts – and most likely more, perhaps as many as 50,000 – along with some 80,000 books from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, 100,000 books from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 60,000 drawings and engravings, 25,000 musical scores and 10,000 maps. The great family libraries were almost wiped out, such as the famous collection of manuscripts of the Krasiński Library, of which just 78 volumes survived out of more than 7,000.¹ ¹ https://www.bn.org.pl/en/news/3855-75-years-ago-the-germans-set-fire-to-the-national-library-in-warsaw.html https://www.bn.org.pl/en/news/3855-75-years-ago-the-germans-...

michael9423 2y ago
> Mr. Garber, the Second World War was also an inferno for German book and library culture. Do we now know more or less exactly what damage and losses occurred at which collection locations in Germany? > Yes, most of the damage is known and extends across the entire old German Reich, from Karlsruhe to Kiel, from Munich to Königsberg. The largest German library in the Reich was hit most spectacularly. In July 1943, the Hamburg City Library alone lost 700,000 volumes in “Aktion Gomorrha”. As far as the individual titles themselves are concerned, the relevant data is often still missing - unfortunately. There is no large and accurate work on the books and libraries that once existed and were lost or not returned during the Second World War. > How do you assess the historical and intellectual damage caused to our cultural memory by the absence of German books? > I will answer this question with a quote from the first expert on the subject from 1947: “It is a catastrophe that has no comparison in the history of libraries and in the history of science” (Georg Leyh). We have no account of the demise of German libraries. Germany has lost significant parts of its cultural memory forever. But who knows about it? Conversely, the greatest crime committed by Germany has led to an irretrievable loss of urban silhouettes and cultural witnesses. The answer? Never-ending mourning and never-ending work of remembrance. https://www.fr.de/kultur/literatur/eine-katastrophe-11007951.html https://www.fr.de/kultur/literatur/eine-katastrophe-11007951... Generally, the cultural loss via burning down libraries and knowledge is inherent to war, and obviously does not only affect one country. The article also mentions the Library of Warsaw as an example of lost knowledge, but the loss of german culture "has no comparison in the history of libraries", per renowned librarian Georg Leyh. P.S.: Germany still does not own the Berlinka - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlinka_(art_collection) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlinka_(art_collection)