Kurt Köster
Kurt Köster also spelled Koetser, (born November 14, 1912 in Wiesbaden, died July 17, 1986 in Munich) was a German librarian and historian. Life and work. Köster was the son of Daniel Köster and his wife Emilie, née Loev. In 1930 he graduated from the Wiesbaden high school on Zietenring and then attended the Pedagogical Academy in Frankfurt am Main. Köster worked as a primary school teacher from 1932 to 1939 then studied history, historical auxiliary sciences, German and musicology in Frankfurt and Munich. On September 9, 1942, he was drafted into the German army. He received his  doctorate on February 12, 1944 in Frankfurt on the subject of ""The Colmar historical sources of the thirteenth century"". At the end of the war he was taken prisoner of war, from which he was released in June 1945. Postwar career. Köster completed his habilitation in 1947 at the University of Frankfurt am Main with a continuation of his doctoral thesis and has since worked there as a private lecturer in historical auxiliary sciences.He remained an adjunct professor in Frankfurt until 1955 and was honorary professor there from 1971. As a part-time job, he compiled an inventory of  the local medieval bells on behalf of the Evangelical Church in Hesse and Nassau. A book about Master Tilman von Hachenburg later grew out of this. In 1948 he married Ursula Fey. The marriage produced a daughter and a son. From 1946 to 1948 Köster worked on the editorial staff of the Europa-Archiv magazine. From 1948 to the end of 1949 he was the editor of the humanities literary magazine Erasmus. In 1950 Köster became an employee and in the following year deputy director of the German Library, which was founded in 1946. From 1959 to 1975 he headed  this institution (as the successor to Hanns Wilhelm Eppelsheimer), which during his tenure was expanded into an important German-language library and a national bibliographic center. A central task was the introduction of electronic data processing in library operations, with the German Bibliography (DB) being the first national bibliography in the world to have been produced entirely using an EDP system since 1966. - Köster was also responsible for the internationally acclaimed exhibition on exile literature 1933–1945 in 1965. On September 30, 1975, he retired. Köster researched the signs of pilgrims; the pilgrim sign card index in the German Bell Archive  of the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg. The rest of his academic papers are also located there. With editions and his own monograph, he promoted the work of the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga in Germany and made a name for himself as a Gutenberg researcher. He also worked on regional history with several publications in the association for Nassau antiquity and historical research (), becoming a member in 1941. On May 4, 1948, he was elected to the Historical Commission for Nassau (), joining the board in 1965. Köster was also chairman of the commission for official printed matter in the  Association of German Librarians (), the culture committee and the specialist committee for documentation, libraries, archives, copyright and statistics of the German UNESCO commission. As a member, he was a member of the Advisory Board of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the "Historical Database" working group of the German Research Foundation and the board of trustees of the microfilm archive of the German-language press. Kurt Köster and the Catalog of "Feigned Books". "Kurt Köster (1912-1986). Köster was the first person to take an interest in objects in the form of books and did so in a remarkably exhaustive way . It is not an accident that Köster was a librarian and bibliographer working in the highest possible post within the German Federal Republic during the years of the Long Boom: from 1951 to 1975, he was head of the Deutsche Bibliothek, first as deputy director and then, beginning in 1959, as director. This institution, which was headquartered in Frankfurt am Main (and which merged after reunification with the Deutsche Bücherei of Leipzig to form the current Deutsche Nationalbibliothek), was in charge of legal deposit of books published in German as well as the ongoing establishment of the German national bibliography