Otto von Habsburg Collection

HOAL I–8

The library of Otto von Habsburg

Otto von Habsburg’s collection of books, newspapers and articles is an invaluable part of the material entrusted to our care. The assemblage includes books penned by our namesake, the writings that appeared in print during his decades-long public career, the literature used in his work – at least part of it -, the volumes he received as gifts from admirers and friends and the newsletters and documentation sent to him in his numerous positions in various organisations. The periodical publications are also composed mainly of press products related to him; some of his articles can be found in them, and others in the form of newspaper clippings.

The material entrusted to our care did not include a catalogue, and we are unaware of any record of his library at his home in Pöcking.

It is apparent that every part of the collection needs to be supplemented since we do not, for example, have all of our eponym’s book publications in our possession. The Foundation’s objective is to fill these gaps in the near future and, with the aim of achieving completeness, to map, obtain, process and make the intellectual legacy of Otto von Habsburg available for research to the professionals and the broader public who are interested in the historical figure and the issues raised by his work. In parallel with this task, we are building a bibliography of his writings, which we intend to make as exhaustive as possible.

A significant part of the collection of nearly 11,000 books is devoted to the fields closest to the owner’s habitus and interests: history, politics, political science, history of ideas and European integration. There is also a considerable amount of material on local history, minority studies and religions, with particular emphasis on church history, including the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the 20th century. The fiction section is enriched primarily by works of Hungarian emigrants. In terms of language, the majority of the material is in German, but there are also a large number of volumes in French, English, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. The oldest items in the collection come from the family’s former bibliotheca, which contains a few dozen publications from the 17th and 19th centuries.

After the Second World War, Otto von Habsburg began to pursue a career as a foreign policy expert. He went on regular lecture tours in the United States, attended conferences and meetings, and published articles in daily and weekly newspapers worldwide. From 1979 he served as a Member of the European Parliament for twenty years. Since the fall of communism, he has returned to Hungary several times a year, visiting hundreds of towns and villages, and has tried to fulfil every invitation. His half-century-long, wide-ranging activities are documented by the 7000 articles written in Hungarian and foreign languages that we have in our collection, although the number of his publications is probably much higher. We have also begun to gather the articles about him and his work that have been published in Hungary. We will continue to announce the fruits of our research on our website.