Perthes Collection Open Day

Information about the exhibition

The exhibition ‘ADEL MACHT STAAT. The Gotha Court Calendar 1763 to 1944’ tells the story of GOTHA in twelve chapters. The GOTHA developed from the widespread calendars of the early modern period and emerged in the context of the Enlightenment in the mid-18th century.

From the outset, the GOTHA was present on the European market as a parallel German-French edition – as the ‘Gothaischer Hofkalender’ and the ‘Almanach de Gotha’. Important Gotha printers and publishers had the GOTHA in their programmes from 1763 onwards. In 1785, Johann Georg Justus Perthes took over the publishing and distribution of the GOTHA, thus founding the famous Justus Perthes Verlag Gotha publishing house. The GOTHA established its unique reputation, forever linked to the city of Gotha, in the 19th century. It became the most important genealogical standard work on European nobility and an influential handbook on the states of the world.

The exhibition at the Gotha Research Library is the first ever to focus on the GOTHA. It aims to make an important contribution to modern intellectual and cultural history, as well as to research into the nobility and the 1250th anniversary of the city of Gotha.

The concept and content of the exhibition are based, among other things, on the latest research findings of the three-year project ‘The Gotha – A study of the most important genealogical reference work in modern Europe’ funded by the DFG and conducted by the University of Hamburg from 2023 to 2026.