[MSN] Germany, Poland Fight Over Manuscripts. Priceless manuscript at a Polish library shows how Mozart wrote down his Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat Major - neat, small notes, no corrections.

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Germany, Poland Fight Over Manuscripts
By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA 08.15.07, 1:54 PM ET


KRAKOW, Poland - A priceless manuscript at a Polish library shows how Mozart
wrote down his Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat Major - neat, small notes, no
corrections.

Its neighbor in the collection, Beethoven's original copy of the third
movement of his Symphony No. 8, bears witness to his creative agonies, with
furious jottings and deletions.

Both manuscripts are towering monuments of Germanic culture.

But they've been in Poland since World War II - and despite pressure from
the German government Poland says it has no intention of giving them back.

The documents at the Jagiellonian Library are among tens of thousands of
manuscripts the Nazis took out of Berlin's national library to protect from
Allied bombings. They were initially moved to a military fortress and then
hidden away in a remote Benedictine monastery. After the war, Polish
authorities transported the manuscripts to the university library in Krakow.

A recent article in Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung referred to the
manuscripts from the former Prussian State Library as "the last German
prisoners of war."

That stirred an angry response from Poland, which called German claims for
their return "entirely groundless."

Negotiations have dragged on for 15 years with no end in sight.

"I consider myself very lucky to be able to take care of this collection and
to help secure it for world culture," library director Zdzislaw Pietrzyk
said in his office. "It really makes an impression on you to be dealing with
a Mozart original."

The library granted The Associated Press a rare viewing of parts of the
collection - which is closed to the public - in a special room protected by
electronic locks and video cameras. The documents are preserved in leather
bindings and normally stored in a climate-controlled safe.

Mozart's manuscript of his piano concerto in B-flat Major - with changes in
the intensity of the ink indicating when the composer dipped his quill - was
displayed on green velvet fabric to protect the leather covers from wear.

There was also a stained and scribbled original manuscript of Beethoven's
Eighth, with corrections in pencil, along with his very sketchy pencil notes
for his Ninth Symphony.

Other treasures included a 15th century Latin prayer book, with gold, pink
and blue letter illuminations; the writings of Jakob Reinhold Lenz, an 18th
century German poet and playwright; and one of the oldest existing music
books, printed in 1507.

German hopes of regaining the collection offend many in Poland, which lost 6
million people and vast cultural treasures, including an estimated 22
million books and hundreds of thousands of art works, in nearly six years of
German World War II occupation.


Bitterness over the war surfaces often between the two countries. At a
European Union summit this summer, Poland insisted that Germany accept its
demand for voting powers disproportionate to its size, saying its population
would be much larger today had Germany not killed so many Poles.

A key issue is that the manuscripts from Berlin were not taken by the Soviet
army, as were many German cultural items at the end of the war, but left
behind by the Germans in territory that later became Poland.

Pietrzyk said it was fortunate that in 1945 a team of Polish librarians
found this part of the Prussian Library collection - which contains roughly
100,000 items - in the Benedictine monastery at Krzeszow, formerly Grussau,
just in time to save it from possible looters. Fifteen of the 505 wooden
chests holding it had already been destroyed or stolen.

The collection, which contains manuscripts by romantic poet Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, was part of a total of about 3 million items that were evacuated
from Berlin libraries between 1941-44. It first went to the Fuerstenberg, or
Ksiaz, fortress in the Sudety mountains, and then on to Krzeszow, when the
fortress was earmarked as a facility for Adolf Hitler.

Poland "legally took custody of the Prussian Library items, which the
Germans had left unattended" while fleeing the Red Army, Foreign Ministry
spokesman Robert Szaniawski said.

Tono Eitel, the chief German negotiator for the return of cultural objects,
was quoted by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as calling Germany's loss
of the treasures a "wound in Germany's cultural life."

In 1947, the treasures were put into the care of the Jagiellonian library,
where they were catalogued and reproduced on microfiche or photocopies for
public viewing.

Several prominent items were returned under communist rule.

In 1977, Polish leader Edward Gierek gave East German leader Erich Honecker
the original scores of Mozart's "The Magic Flute," his Mass in C-minor, the
"Jupiter" Symphony and Bach's concerto in C-minor. In return, Honecker
handed over a portrait of Poland's 17th century King Jan III Sobieski.

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