Brentano’s papers were rescued on the last civilian plane out of Prague
Evidence
Brentano’s papers — still stored in an archive office in Prague — had meanwhile been through their own adventure. When Hitler moved on from the Sudetenland to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, a group of archivists and scholars gathered most of them and spirited them out of the country on the very last civilian plane to leave. The papers ended up in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and are still there today. The few files left behind were defenestrated through the office window by German soldiers, and mostly lost. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 423
Categorization
- DEFINE: Concrete instance of the pattern that philosophy’s texts survive through lucky material rescues — supports the book’s running theme of archives as fragile.
- FICTION: A last-plane-out-of-Prague archive rescue with defenestrated documents is a ready-made scene of wartime urgency.
- XREF: connects to: Husserl’s archive narrowly escaped moving to Prague before the war — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 407
Broader Connections
- Husserl’s archive narrowly escaped moving to Prague before the war
#corroborates(0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 407