Bibliophiles and Bibliothieves

In Bibliophiles and Bibliothieves, Opritsa Popa has documented what might justifiably be described as the most celebrated case of looting of two German cultural treasures by a member of the U.S. Army at the end of World War II and their subsequent odyssey across both an ocean and a continent: the pilfering from a cellar in Bad Wildungen of the ninth-century Liber Sapientiae, containing the two leaves of the oldest extant German heroic poem, the Old High German Hildebrandslied, along with the fourteenth-century illuminated Willehalm codex, both of which had been removed from the State Library in Kassel for protection from bombing raids.

Opritsa D. Popa is Distinguished Libration at Shields Library, University of California, Davis.