Review of Uwe Fleckner and Peter Mack, eds., The Afterlife of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: The Emigration and the Early Years of the Warburg Institute in London (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015)

After Warburg’s death, his library needed to relocate in order to escape the Nazis. Considering different options, the collection and its staff stranded in London. The volume under review commemorates the 1933 transfer of the Hamburg institute to its exile in London. Uwe Fleckner’s introduction and Isabella Woldt’s contributions shed new light on this transitional period. The transformation of a private collection with public access to a university institute turns out to be also a “family matter.” Woldt’s article adds important aspects to the well-known contemporary account by Fritz Saxl, Warburg’s library assistant and the Warburg Institute’s first director. All other contributions deal with the afterlife of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (K.B.W.) in Britain.