Kassel University Library

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (April 2010) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Universitätsbibliothek Kassel]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Universitätsbibliothek Kassel}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The Universitätsbibliothek Kassel (or Kassel University Library) is a library located in the city of Kassel, Germany. Composed of the collections of the former Landesbibliothek (state library) and Murhardsche Bibliothek der Stadt Kassel (Murhard Library of the City of Kassel) as well as that of the Kassel University library, amongst the library's holdings is the manuscript of the 9th-century German poem, the Hildebrandslied.

The first component of the library, the Landesbibliothek, evolved from the collection of the Kassel Court Library of the Landgraves of Hesse, and was officially made a "state library" with the Hesse Constitution of 1831. Its collection was housed at the Fridericianum, continental Europe's first public museum, and specialized in the fields of history, philology, archaeology, art, geography, theology, and law.

The second component library, the Murhardsche Bibliothek der Stadt Kassel long served as the city's second research library. Founded in 1845 by the brothers Friedrich and Karl Murhard, sons of an old Hessian merchant dynasty, it specialized in political science, economics, and pedagogy.

The British Royal Air Force destroyed most of the library by aerial bombing on 9 September 1943, about 7/8 of its holdings of ca. 400,000 volumes. Even the books kept in safes smoldered away due to the surrounding heat. The Zwehren Tower, however, which holds large parts of the manuscripts, remains unscathed.^[1][2]

The third component library comprised the holdings of Kassel University, founded in it modern incarnation in 1970.

The three libraries were merged into a single system in 1976.