1920: The Renaming of the Court Library

The Austrian National Library emerged out of the Imperial Court Library in Vienna, which had already been made available to the public in the first half of the 18th century. Perhaps the most important and at least the most apparent step toward that transformation was the renaming of the library, which only took place two years after the end of the monarchy (1920). At that time, the court library, which had previously been under the jurisdiction of the Office of the Imperial and Royal Treasurer, was finally taken over into the state property of the young republic and assumed into the Office of Education. The director, Josef Donabaum considered different variations for the new name of the library (State Library, Central State Library, Federal Library, National Library), and ultimately chose the one that seemed least unsuitable.

However, what appears as self-evident from today’s perspective was by no means uncontroversial at the time. For, at the beginning of the interwar period, Austria was not, generally speaking, considered a separate “nation”, but a part of Germany. The library administration and the Office of Education therefore avoided introducing the designation National Library together with the attribute Austrian. Only after an additional renaming following the Second World War did the National Library finally become the Austrian National Library.