When her husband died in 1758 after just two years of marriage, Anna Amalia became ruler of the tiny Saxon duchy. She conducted affairs of state with great prudence. In 1775, she handed over the government of the duchy, clear of debt, to her eldest son, Carl August, leaving her more time for her intellectual pursuits.
Her famous soirées were regularly attended from 1775 by the ‘greats of intellectual history’, who met for vigorous exchange of ideas on questions of art, music, literature and theatre; Goethe, Herder, Wieland, von Seckendorff and Knebel were amongst her guests. The famous library in Weimar, badly damaged by fire in 2004, is named after Anna Amalia – from autumn 2007, fully restored, the library will be reopening its doors to visitors.
The Duchess Anna Amalia Library holds literary records dating from the ninth to the twenty-first century. Since its collections for the period 1750 to 1850 are particularly plentiful, the epoch from the Enlightenment to the Late Romantic constitutes the Library’s primary focus.
The research library, which is housed in the new Bücherkubus and Tiefenmagazin buildings, contains over one million volumes, with a focus of the collection being on German cultural and literary history of the Classical period between 1750 and 1850, with particular emphasis on German language and literature studies, history, philosophy, art, music and Thuringia. Amongst the special collections are the world’s largest corpus of works about Faust, containing 13,000 volumes, and a considerable Shakespeare collection numbering 10,000 volumes.
