“The library serves the institute”, says Joachim Schwietzke and unfolds a century‑spanning portrait of the MPIL’s collection: from Berlin Palace and a “central room” featuring a paper index, through wartime loss and postwar rescues, to Heidelberg’s systematically arranged library stacks stretching 43 kilometres. He argues that serious international and public law research rests on curated foundations: treaties, statute and case reports, parliamentary records, and the publications of the UN, EU, and League of Nations—framed by a General Section that puts law in dialogue with history, philosophy, sociology, and military and colonial studies.
About Joachim Schwietzke
Against keyword search, Schwietzke defends expert selection, multilingual breadth, and on‑site browsing—methods that keep scholarship anchored in sources and context, and keep the institute’s mission at the heart of the library.
Joachim Schwietzke, a lawyer turned librarian, helped shape one of the world’s preeminent specialist law libraries at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. Joining the institute in 1975 and later serving as Library Director, he steered its transformation from paper indexes to digital systems while expanding a systematically arranged, closed‑stacks collection spanning international law, comparative public law, legal philosophy, and a striking General Section that embeds law in history, sociology, and military and colonial studies. A longtime leader in the International Association of Law Libraries, he also co‑authored widely used bibliographical compendia on diplomatic conferences and multilateral treaty practice (1641–1924), reference works that bridge archival rigor and scholarly utility.
