Two 19th-century books stolen from Wrocław including Karl Marx’s “Mr Vogt” and “Anecdotes on Recent German Philosophy and Journalism by Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Köppen, Karl Nauwerk, Arnold Ruge and Others Not Named”, edited by Arnold Ruge have returned to the collection of the University Library in Wrocław.

Participating in the presentation of the books, the Director of the Department for the Restitution of Cultural Property at the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (MKiDN), Elżbieta Rogowska, informed that the publications had been identified on the Austrian antiquarian market by a researcher at the University Library in Wrocław. Thanks to the restitution measures taken by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the previous owners of the old prints decided to return them to Poland.

During the communist period, a large part of the Wrocław library’s collection was stolen and illegally exported abroad due to the lack of adequate security and electronic catalogues, as well as the difficult flow of information with other countries. Nowadays, thanks to new search technologies, widespread digitisation, as well as the development of research allowing the identification of ownership marks (even those that were deliberately obliterated or removed before the stolen items were placed on the foreign antiquarian market), some of the lost unique library items are being found.

Two nineteenth-century publications – Karl Marx’s ‘Mr Vogt’ (London, 1860) and a collection of ‘Anecdotes on Recent German Philosophy and Journalism by Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Köppen, Karl Nauwerk, Arnold Ruge and Others Not Named’ (containing Karl Marx’s first political pamphlet, i.e. the anonymously published text “Notes on the Recent Instructions of the Prussian Censorship. From an inhabitant of the Rhineland”), were stolen from the University Library in Wrocław probably in the 1990s. Their absence was discovered in 2004. 

Arkadiusz Słomczyński