| Gotha Research Library

From Gotha into the world: Perthes, Haack and Heidi

To mark the highlight of Thuringia Day in Gotha, the film "Perthes, Haack and Heidi – From Gotha into the World" by Anna Neuhaus and Amelie Befeldt will be shown again on MDR television on Saturday, 3 May at 12.30 pm. Created in 2021 for the MDR series "Der Osten – Entdecke wo du lebst", the film tells the story of the global reach of publishing houses founded in Gotha, cartographers who worked here and books published here.

Ancestral Hall in the Perthes Forum Gotha
Ancestral Hall in the Perthes Forum Gotha

The Perthes family wrote publishing history in Gotha. Justus Perthes founded a publishing house here in 1785, which made the royal seat the centre of geography in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the GDR era, Perthes became VEB Hermann Haack, whose Haack World Atlas could be found in nearly every household. By this time, the Friedrich Andreas Perthes publishing house no longer existed. Its founder in 1822 was Friedrich Christoph Perthes, a nephew of Justus Perthes. And his son Andreas continued to run the publishing house. This history is largely forgotten, but the publishing house's most famous product is still known throughout the world today – the Heidi books by Johanna Spyri. The first editions of the Swiss national treasure were published in Gotha. From here, they began their media triumph around the globe – as books, films, anime, comics, musicals and in advertising.

Today, the Gotha Perthes Collection is one of the largest and most beautiful map publishing archives in Europe with 185,000 maps, 120,000 books and 800 metres of archive. On a total of 1,700 square metres, the Perthes Forum in Gotha stores the history of discovery and cartography of the world, maps tell of the colonisation of entire continents, but also of climate change. This unique archive harbours world knowledge and is alive today as a place of research and science.

More links

Back