Unlike France, Italy, England, and the United States, Germany did not possess a national library until very recently. Although the Deutsche Bücherei, established in Leipzig in 1912 for the sole purpose of collecting all German-language literature (except periodicals), preparing this material for use, and cataloging it according to professional standards, claimed to be the German national library, it faced competition throughout almost its entire history from both the Prussian State Library in Berlin and, after 1946, from the Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt. This issue was finally resolved in 2006 when the Deutsche Bibliothek, the Deutsche Bücherei, and the Music Archive of West Berlin merged into the German National Library with locations in both Leipzig and Frankfurt.

In his thoughtful book, Christian Rau traces the turbulent history of the Deutsche Bücherei from its inception until 2006, with the lion's share of his account dedicated to the Deutsche Bücherei in the German Democratic Republic. From the outset, the Deutsche Bücherei saw itself as a singular institution with the express task to safeguard the memory of the nation. Even the choice of the term Bücherei instead of the more common Bibliothek is revelatory: its founders desired to delineate it from academic libraries, an act that drew the ire of librarians who saw in the Bücherei a monstrosity that would not discriminate between valuable and worthless literature.

Rau outlines these uneven beginnings as the result of World War I and the disastrous inflationary period, which resulted in the Bücherei closing to the public in 1923. The Bücherei's fortunes soon changed, however, so that by 1933 it eclipsed the holdings of the Prussian State Library in Berlin. Rau then briefly addresses the Nazi era, revealing an institution complicit with the Nazis by placing many “undesirable” books under lock and key, and welcoming books stolen from the Vienna National Library. Physically, the library came through World War II remarkably well. When U.S. forces arrived in Leipzig, they found the library's collection mostly intact because 80 percent of the more than 2 million volumes had been relocated for safekeeping.

Order Number 12 of the Soviet Military Authority in Germany re-established the Deutsche Bücherei and placed it at the disposal of the occupation authorities. The librarian was now no longer to be simply a technician, but a teacher for the masses (100). Although the Soviets foresaw the library as a tool for indoctrination, the implementation of this strategy proved problematic. Censorship was the first hurdle. The long-serving director of the Deutsche Bücherei, Heinrich Uhlendahl, met with Soviet authorities on a regular basis to determine which books would be kept in the Sperrmagazin, ostensibly a special collection accessible only to those with a specific research need, but in reality a collection of books that the Soviets considered hostile to communism. Rau here makes a convincing case that librarians in the Bücherei often enjoyed significant leeway and placed pragmatism and their professional training above propaganda. “The sought-after totality of the book purging,” Rau summarizes “remained an illusion” (176).

The Sperrmagazin emerges as a central theme of the book. By 1957, the total number of volumes considered fascist, militarist, or anti-democratic had reached 108,470, or 4.2% percent of the overall collection. As the Socialist Unity Party clamped down on West German literature mailed privately into East Germany, and even made institutions requiring it for research obtain special permission from the GDR's Ministry of Culture, the Deutsche Bücherei increasingly became the only legal venue to access West German literature during the Cold War. East German use of the Sperrmagazin, colloquially known as the “hole in the wall,” increased accordingly, as librarians were less than rigorous regarding access. Nevertheless, usage of the special collection was never without risk. The Stasi carefully monitored users who did not appear to have a viable research project.

As was so often the case in the two Germanys of the Cold War, the Deutsche Bücherei existed in a symbiotic relationship with its West German counterpart, the Deutsche Bibliothek, established in 1946 in Frankfurt am Main. Both leveraged the existence of the other into increased resources, lest one side lost face in the Cold War. The Iron Curtain proved to be distinctly porous as well. East German librarians were frequent visitors to Western book fairs, while West German publishers continued to send complimentary copies of their books to the Deutsche Bücherei in order to get them into circulation in Eastern Europe.

In highlighting the librarians’ ability to make individual decisions, Rau subscribes to the school of thought that East German stability was rooted in compromise between the regime and society rather than top-down repression. He even goes so far as to describe the relationship between the Stasi and the Deutsche Bücherei as a “resource-exchange,” suggesting that librarians were able to obtain financial resources for their institution in return for informing on the library's users (665). Given that no fewer than eighteen Stasi informants held leadership positions in the Deutsche Bücherei—including Helmut Rötzsch, the director from 1961 to 1990, who also worked for the Stasi as an informant codenamed Sand—and that their advantageous positions were intimately connected to their work for the Stasi, one may reasonably ask if this resource-exchange was as equal as the author suggests.

At more than 700 pages on one (albeit landmark) library in East Germany, including detailed biographical information on those who oversaw the reading room and the precise number of Deutsche Bücherei employees who were permitted to take their lunch at the University of Leipzig student cafeteria (151), Rau's book is not for the faint of heart. Regrettably, Rau's nuanced positioning of the Deutsche Bücherei as neither pawn nor promoter of the GDR's ruling party likely will be lost on most readers because of the static of peripheral information that would have been better relegated to the footnotes.