Es war eine Stadt wie im Märchen

The history and culture of old cities have been documented for centuries in archives, libraries and museums. This little book tells the story of the important cathedral city of Hildesheim with help from the collections of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library in Hanover. The library holds many thousands of pages of manuscripts relating to Hildesheim from the middle ages to the 18th century; they include two particular treasures: the ‘Aufschwörungsbuch’ of the Cathedral Chapter and the Esther Roll by the Hildesheim artist Leib Katz Poppers. The library also contains all the books published in Hildesheim since the mid-20th century, some tens of thousands of volumes. And there are older novels and stories where Hildesheim plays a role. Sample extracts from these are reprinted and – like the other texts – are seen by Georg Ruppelt, a native of Lower Saxony, as a small declaration of love for Hildesheim.