In the magazine Unser Danzig published by ex-citizens of Gdańsk in the years of 1949–2008, one must pay attention not only to politically-engaged texts, but also to obituaries which present lives of the deceased and missing their lost fatherland. The aim of these obituaries is not only to inform about someone’s death, but also to acccept the regional origin of the deceased, which is presented by linguistic and paralinguistic means.

1905 was a milestone year for the Gdansk Municipal Library – its collections were relocated for the very first time in their history to a building erected especially for the purpose, and the entire institution stepped into the 20th century and the world of modern librarianship: a planned collection, scientific cataloguing and indexing, and streamlined circulation. The article presents the specific nature of work at the Library as a Prussian and German facility, as an institution of the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk) and during the two world wars, and shows how it changed over the period of forty years under the supervision of its subsequent directors – Otton Günther, Friedrich Schwarz, and Hermann Hassbargen. In 1945 the century-and-a-half long period of the history of the Gdansk Library as Danziger Stadtbibliothek, the successor of Bibliotheca Senatus Gedanensis and the predecessor of the Gdansk PAS Library, came to an end.