Adler Collection.
Architects Hans Edward and Hedwig Adler fled Nazi Germany to England in 1939, leaving most of their possessions to Hedwig’s mother in Cologne.
When Hedwig died in 1986, her daughter Susan, while clearing out the flat, found a suitcase in the attic, a suitcase that contained 257 Soviet children’s books, 169 of them in Russian, 85 in Ukrainian and 3 in Yiddish, mostly published between the late 1920s and 1933, which she donated to the Biblioteca Braidense in 2020. A major exhibition the books was prepared in Spring 2021, and the catalogue, published by Corraini in Fall 2021, has been one of the Centre’s priorities for 2021.
Browse three books from the Collection
On BreraPlus.org, the online platform reserved for Brera subscribers, you can view the interactive documentary Tempi Terribili. Libri Belli. The reportage and extra content allows you to explore a selection of thirty books from the Adler collection and delve into the political and cultural context with digital storytelling tools.
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La Collezione Adler di libri sovietici per bambini 1930-1933
Federica Rossi, James M. Bradburne, John E. Bowlt Corraini Edizioni, 2021
Donate a collection
CIRCI avails itself of the collections of the Braidense National Library, including those of the Adler and Prutscher children’s books.
As a non-profit association, CIRCI welcomes donations of collections of children’s books, toys, illustrations and other archival material, in order to increase the research opportunities of its scholars and users.
