É. Apor (ed.): David Kaufmann Memorial Volume: Papers Presented at the David Kaufmann Memorial Conference, November 29, 1999, Budapest.

ORMOS, István: David Kaufmann and his Collection

ISTVÁN ORMOS Seminary and removed a few thousand books.

6' It is beyond doubt that he would have included this famous collection in his selection if it had been there. It was the König family who preserved Kaufmann's vast correspondence in several chests in the attic of their house at 93 Szondi street. Until his death in 1938 Ludwig (Lajos) König used to classify the letters. When the family moved to a smaller flat in a modern apartment house the mother, Margit König, had built at 18 Vitéz street in the Víziváros (Watertown) quarter of Buda in 1938, they left the correspondence behind because there was no place for it in the new house. Around 1941 it was destroyed when civilian defence regulations were passed prohibiting the preservation of combustible material in the attics of houses for the duration of the war - this the concierge told Margit König after the end of the war in 1945, when she inquired about Kaufmann's correspondence. In any case, the invaluable letters and notes disappeared without a trace. There can be no doubt that they were destroyed. According to contemporary press reports, a "very large number" of printed books in Kaufmann's possession was acquired by the "very smart" local antiquarian bookseller Schlesinger,

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4 who sold them partly to the Seminary and partly to various private individuals so that a considerable number of them even reached the Vienna bookmarket. Allegedly by a misunderstanding, Schlesinger started selling off these items to individuals before the Seminary could acquire everything it wanted. Copies of Kaufmann's own works including numerous off-prints bearing marginal notes in his familiar handwriting were offered for sale in large numbers, partly in Budapest and partly in Berlin." It is often asserted that Kaufmann himself or his wife donated the collection to the Academy or that it was in accordance with his or their intentions that his mother-in-law offered it to this prestigious institution. The former statement is of course a mistake and, to my knowledge, no proof has ever been found to substantiate the latter - the passage in Mrs. Gomperz's donation deed is perhaps simply a pious rhetorical device. Maybe after the sudden death of her husband Kaufmann's wife was already considering the eventual future of the collection, but it has to be assumed that during his lifetime Kaufmann himself was simply not occupied with this question: after all, he belonged to the peculiar species of passionate collectors and although he did have 6

3 FROJIMOVICS - KOMORÓCZY - PUSZTAI - STRBIK 1999. 207. 6

4 The SCHLESINGER publishing house and book-store was located at 1 Király street. The company moved to Tel-Aviv in the late 1930s, where it has been active ever since. See FROJIMOVICS - KOMORÓCZY - PUSZTAI - STRBIK 1999. 178-179. The firm seems to have specialized in Hebrew and Jewish publications only because it does not appear in a general account of the Budapest antiquarian book-market in those days. See Ödön STEMMER, Egy antikvárius visszaemlékezései [The recollections of an antiquarian bookseller]. Budapest 1985. 16-18. 6

5 See the note [Anon.:] Gomperz Róza = Magyar-Zsidó Szemle 23 (1906) 208. 140