Silentium!

In the midst of Zurich's liberal awakening in the 1830s, educated citizens and professors from the young university founded the Museum Society Zurich with the aim of maintaining a comprehensive reading institution. It was a reading society, like many others at the time, but the Museum Society quickly earned a place among the best-funded and most welcoming societies of its kind in Europe. Thomas Ehrsam tells the story of this reading society as a narrative of the private reading habits of the bourgeoisie in the city of Zurich. In both peacetime and wartime, it was a refuge of liberal openness, reflected in the library's acquisition policy as well as in its welcoming of guests and emigrants. Joyce, Tucholsky, Lasker-Schüler, and many others read as members or guests of the Museum Society. The tradition of openness also applies to the last ten years.