Collection Gottlob Frege

Dear Alfred!
Do not despise the manuscripts I have written. Even if all is not gold, there is gold in it. I believe that some of it will someday be valued much more highly than it is now. Make sure that none of this gets lost ... It is a large part of myself that I am leaving with you.

A tragedy you will feel with me happened to us with our work on FREGE. The publication of his small writings, including the entire personal papers, which I had been preparing for several years, was thwarted by the outbreak of war. I handed the precious material over to our university library for safekeeping. It is completely burnt. I was only able to save the carbon copies that I had kept with my own papers for just in case.

About Gottlob Frege

* 8 November 1848 in Wismar
† 26 July 1925 in Bad Kleinen

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege grew up in Wismar, where his father worked as a teacher and director of a lyceum. After graduating from high school, Frege studied in Jena, then in Göttingen. There he wrote his doctoral thesis Über eine geometrische Darstellung der imaginären Gebilde in der Ebene (On a Geometrical Representation of Imaginary Forms in a Plane) in 1873.

Gottlob Frege returned to Jena University and completed his habilitation Über Rechnungsmethoden, die sich auf eine Erweiterung des Größenbegriffes gründen (On calculation methods based on an extension of the concept of size) in 1874. He then worked as a private lecturer. In 1879 he was appointed associate professor, in 1895 he was elected a member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher (German Academy of Sciences) Leopoldina, and in 1896 Frege became a full honorary professor.

The mathematician Gottlob Frege was a co-founder of analytical philosophy and modern logic. His linguistic-philosophical observations influenced Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, among others. With his work he laid the foundations for today's computer and information technology.

About the collection

In 1935, Prof. Heinrich Scholz received the scientific personal papers of Gottlob Frege on loan from his adoptive son Alfred Frege, under the condition that they should be handed over to Münster University Library for permanent storage after processing. The papers were first kept in the Seminar (later named "Institut") für Mathematische Logik und Grundlagenforschung (Department for Mathematical Logic and Foundational Research). The edition of the works and the scientific correspondence of Gottlob Frege intended by Heinrich Scholz did not come about before the Second World War.

The valuable original manuscripts from Frege's personal papers were destroyed during the Second World War; only the duplicates of typewritten copies remained, which Heinrich Scholz had commissioned before the war and presumably kept in his private apartment. For decades it was assumed that Frege’s papers were destroyed in Münster University Library during the last days of the war. However, new evidence suggests that both Frege’s papers and the personal papers of the important mathematician and logician Ernst Schröder (1841–1902) were destroyed on 10 October 1943 in Heinrich Scholz's seminar or in an associated air raid shelter in the old University of Münster, situated near the Cathedral square. After the war, Heinrich Scholz stated that he had given Frege’s papers to the university library for better protection after his seminar had been destroyed during the air raids. However, the university library was also badly destroyed on 10 October 1943, so this statement is most likely not true.

Furthermore, in a letter to Max Bense on 28 October 1943 Heinrich Scholz wrote about the destruction of his seminar:

The air raid shelter with the most precious things, especially Frege’s manuscripts, collapsed so far that it is still not possible to tell whether something can be saved or not.

After the death of Heinrich Scholz, all of the Frege copies that could be found in his personal papers were compiled to form the Frege-Archiv (Frege Archive), which was brought to Konstanz (Constance) for editing purposes for some years and later returned to Münster – albeit no longer complete. Parts of Heinrich Scholz's pre-war correspondence with publishers concerning a Frege edition are now thought to be kept in the Philosophisches Archiv of the University of Konstanz.

In 2018, the Department for Mathematical Logic and Foundational Research handed over the Personal Papers Heinrich Scholz and the Frege Archive to the University and State Library of Münster for indexing and storage. The Frege Archive, insofar as it could be reconstructed, was renamed Sammlung Frege (Collection Frege). It has been indexed together with the Personal Papers Heinrich Scholz in an inventory; it contains the following documents in 45 archive boxes:

• Work manuscripts (Frege)
• Correspondence (Frege)
• Prints (Frege)
• Life documents (Frege)
• Correspondence concerning the Frege Archive
• Publication documents (correspondence, draft texts, page proofs, etc.)

Worth reading

For more information see the German version of this page.