Interior view of the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus© Wienbibliothek im Rathaus Founded in 1856 as a communal or civil service library, today’s Vienna City Library soon developed – instigated when the library inherited the estate of Franz Grillparzer in 1879 – to become an important cultural historical archive. The library and its collections count today as one of Vienna’s three largest scholarly libraries and it is the most important institution for research into the city’s cultural history after 1750.

The music collection, which is founded on the collection of Schubert manuscripts from industrialist and patron of the arts Nicolaus Dumba, has approximately 18,500 individually inventoried music manuscripts and around 73,000 music prints. It actively collects the inventories of Austrians from the world of music who were persecuted by the Nazi regime, among these Viennese composers Erich Paul Stekel (1898–1978), Ernst Krenek (1900–1991) or Walter Arlen (born in 1920). One main focus of the manuscript collection, which contains around 250,000 individually catalogued manuscripts and 1,000 estates, as well as collections donated by living musicians and archives, is the acquisition of exile collections. A selection of the circa 50 personal estates that are of significance for the exile period of 1933 to 1945 highlight the diversity of the existing areas of interest. The list of those whose belongings form part of the inventory includes mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), legal expert – and Karl Kraus’ lawyer – Oskar Samek (1889–1959), painter and sculptor Georg Ehrlich (1897–1966), directors Max Reinhardt (1873–1943) and Ernst Haeusserman (1916–1984) as well as the authors Alexander Roda Roda (1872–1945), Felix Braun (1885–1973), Franz Theodor Csokor (1885–1969), Ernst Lothar (1890–1974), Hans Weigel (1908–1991) or Fritz Hochwälder (1911–1986); what is more, the between 35,000 and 40,000 individual items that make up the extensive body of correspondence by Friedrich Torberg (1908–1979) is also kept in the manuscript collection.

While a number of exile locations play a role in the archived objects, for example, the Soviet Union (Philip Herschkowitz, composer, 1906–1989), Shanghai (Joe Lederer, author, 1904–1987), Palestine (Martha Hofmann, author, 1895–1975) or Ciudad de Guatemala (Franz Ippisch, composer, 1883–1958), one area of focus is exile in English-speaking locations and, as part of these, the emigration city New York. It was to there that not only Roda Roda and Torberg, but also the writers Raoul Auernheimer (1876–1948), Wilhelm Börner (1882–1951) and Josef Luitpold Stern (1886–1966), the composer and singer Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959) or the art historian couple Hans Tietze (1880–1954) and Erika Tietze-Conrat (1883–1958) emigrated.

Publications (Selection)

Norbert Rubey: Ernst-Krenek-Archiv. Musikhandschriften in der Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek. Eine Bestandsaufnahme. Wien: Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek 1996 (Publikationen aus der Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek 3).
Matthias Schmidt (Hg.): Ernst Krenek. Zeitgenosse des 20. Jahrhunderts / Companion of the Twentieth Century. Wien: Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek 2000 (Publikationen aus der Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek 6).
Thomas Aigner: Der musikalische Nachlass Bruno Granichstaedtens. Hausarbeit zur Prüfung für den höheren Bibliotheksdienst. Wien 2004.
Thomas Aigner: Eric Paul Stekel. In: Michel Cullin, Primavera Driessen Gruber (Hg.): Douce France? Musik-Exil in Frankreich / Musiciens en exil en France 1933–1945. Wien u.a.: Böhlau 2008.
„Schreib. Nein, schreib nicht.“ Marlene Dietrich / Friedrich Torberg. Briefwechsel 1946–1979. Hg. von Marcel Atze. Wien: Holzhausen 2008.
Marcel Atze u. Marcus G. Patka: Die „Gefahren der Vielseitigkeit“. Friedrich Torberg 1908–1979. Wien: Holzhausen 2008.
Norbert Rubey (Hg.): Marcel Prawy. „Ich mache nur, was ich liebe“. Begleitbuch zur 251. Wechselausstellung der Wienbibliothek im Rathaus. Wien: Amalthea 2008.
Marcel Atze u. Kyra Waldner (Hg.): Andere Seiten. Private Adreßbücher prominenter Zeitgenossen aus zwei Jahrhunderten Kunst, Literatur und Musik. Wien: Metroverlag 2011.
Georg Traska u. Christoph Lind: Hermann Leopoldi, Hersch Kohn. Eine Biographie. Wien: mandelbaum 2012.
Friedrich Torberg: Mein ist die Rache. Novelle. Hg. mit einem Nachwort u. einer Zeittafel von Marcel Atze. München: dtv 2008.
Albert Drach: Das Goggelbuch. Hg. von Gerhard Hubmann u. Eva Schobel. Mit einem Nachwort von Eva Schobel. Wien: Zsolnay 2011 (Werke in zehn Bänden, Bd. 7/1).