Deutsche Bibliothek

[5] The German national library, the Deutsche Bücherei (founded 1912) was located in Leipzig, which was then in the Soviet-controlled eastern zone.

[6] In September 1946, the American military government approved the creation of a reference library in Frankfurt am Main.

The city of Frankfurt am Main provided the premises, the costs were borne by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels.

The Börsenverein reduced its contributions from 1956.: S. As early as 1953, 337 space problems made it necessary to distribute the holdings to three locations in the city.

The donors, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, the state of Hesse and the city of Frankfurt am Main, had withdrawn and the Federal Republic of Germany became the sole support provider.

[12][13] The construction of an online catalog began in the mid-1980s:[14] The two libraries in Frankfurt and Leipzig published largely identical national bibliographies until 1990.

In 1966, the German Library began to compile its bibliography with the help of the EDP under the direction of the Deputy General Director Rudolf Blum and was able to reduce the long processing times with a significantly smaller personnel expenditure than the German Library and to appear before its Leipzig counterpart.

The new building, inaugurated in 1959, was designed by architects Alois Giefer and Hermann Mäckler in the style of post-war modernism.

:[17] They consisted of a storage tower with reading rooms on the two lower floors, which was raised to a height of 43 meters in 1968,[18] and a two-story administration wing with a centrally arranged glass entrance front.

In 2004 the property was sold to the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, which had the ensemble, consisting of two storage towers, an administration wing and an underground car park, demolished for the construction of the West Arcade.

The underground floors lie in the groundwater and are designed as a white tank with an additional external seal, the bottom plate of which is secured against uplift with a layer of 70,000 tons of iron ore and in which a second, internally ventilated concrete tank is built.