„Einen Einzigen verehren“? Der Goethe-Sammler Anton Kippenberg

In the organizer's words:

In his memoirs, Anton Kippenberg recounts a scene from his childhood that set the tone for his entire life - whether it was invented or not. On a family trip to Weimar in 1884, his father - a teacher in Bremen - stands angrily in front of Goethe's closed former home on the Frauenplan and shouts: "You can't get into this house!" His then ten-year-old son Anton Hermann Friedrich would make it his life's work to make Goethe's life and work accessible to a wider audience.

The former director and owner of the Insel publishing house, Anton Kippenberg (1874-1950), a friend of Stefan Zweig, Rilke and Roman Rolland, was one of the "old, princely-minded and equally intellectual publishers" (J. Mühlberger). He amassed the largest private collection on Goethe and his environment that has ever existed, published countless Goethe prints in his publishing house, researched the master and shaped the Weimar Goethe Society as president from 1938 until his death. The Leipzig Goethe admirer borrowed his motto from the work of the admired author: "Worship a single one".

Between devotion and calculation: The lecture portrays the great philologist, collector and bookmaker and places him in the context of contemporary history using previously unknown documents from the Kippenberg Collection kept in the Goethe Museum Düsseldorf.

Accompanying program to the exhibition "Poetry Icon. Collecting, researching, venerating, communicating GOETHE" at the Bibliotheca Albertina, daily from 10 am to 6 pm, Free admission.