Hennef-Geistingen - Former Redemptorist monastery

Historischen Katalog starten

A few years after the centenary of the establishment of the convent and study house of the Redemptorist Order in Hennef-Geistingen in 1902, the entire complex was sold and abandoned by the Redemptorists in the spring of 2006. In the course of this change, the library, whose 180,000 volumes had served the convent as well as the Philosophical-Theological College, which had already been dissolved in 1996, was also dissolved and scattered to the winds. After valuable parts such as the 43 incunabula had gone to the Redemptorist Monastery of Heiligenstadt and other religious institutions, a buyer of the remaining stock as a whole was sought and found in an antiquarian who offered the books on eBay (cf. http://www.mgh-bibliothek.de/dokumente/a/a132523.pdf). There, the library of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica succeeded in acquiring about 200 volumes - both old prints and more recent literature, primarily on patristics, ascetics and the intellectual history of the late Middle Ages (cf. https://www.mgh.de/de/bibliothek/ueber-die-mgh-bibliothek/seminarbibliothek-der-redemptoristen-hennef-geistingen?highlight=geistingen).

The library was one of numerous important religious (college) libraries in the greater Cologne area, almost all of which have been dissolved or closed and relocated in the last 25 years: Franciscans in Mönchengladbach (partial dissolution), Spiritans in Knechtsteden (partial dissolution), Jesuits in Cologne (relocation to Munich). Dominicans in Walberberg (affiliation with the Archbishop's Diocesan and Cathedral Library of Cologne), Redemptorists in Geistingen (dissolution). The fate of the library of the former Benedictine Abbey of Siegburg is still open. Of all these libraries, only a part of the Walberberg as well as the Geistingen holdings had been entered into the North Rhine-Westphalia Union Database. After the library was finally dissolved, it proved necessary to delete its records from the Verbunddatenbank as well. At the suggestion of the North Rhine-Westphalia University Library Center, the "Historical Holdings in the Rhineland" department decided to take over the holdings recorded there - about 14,000 titles of primarily older and old prints - as a historical partial catalog of this collection, which no longer exists, and to make it accessible as a source of library history research. In addition, the not at all rare title records, for which only Geistingen copies were recorded, are preserved.