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The visitor to Werner Loibl's home in Gauting, near Munich, would be led into a recent annex to the building: a large hall made of wood and glass that housed his extraordinary library. That library contained old books and manuscripts on the history of Bavaria, an exquisite choice of books on German glass and 17th-century alchemical treatises, and a colossal (perhaps three to four meters high) statue of Buddha that had originally been a mock-up in some museum exhibition. This may not have been exactly typical for a scholar devoted to Bavarian regional history, but Loibl loved the unexpected, and he seems to have shaped his life accordingly.
Werner Loibl was born in Munich in the final and terrible years of World War II. As his physique would show even late in life, he had engaged in his youth in various athletics, such as hammer throwing and ski racing. He studied political economics in Munich, and he was among the first experts to be involved in setting up a municipal electronic data processing system, first in Munich in 1962 and then in the state of Bavaria. In 1972, he became head of the press office of the city of Munich. He thus oversaw the city's public relations during the Munich Olympic Games, which ended prematurely with the horrible attacks by terrorists. Loibl then taught at the Munich Academy of Administration and Economics, and he was also engaged in development aid projects in Africa.
History had always been Werner Loibl's foremost passion. Beginning in 1968, he had published regularly on the history of Bavaria. In 1980, he was offered the directorship of the Spessartmuseum in Lohr am Main, a small town on the eastern fringes of the vast Spessart forest between Frankfurt and Würzburg. He immediately launched an innovative development concept for the museum, and he organized an extensive series of exhibitions. One show in particular, "Glück und Glas" in 1984, was widely acclaimed beyond the region.
It was there, in Lohr, that Werner Loibl came across the history of glass for the first time. This was then to become his life's focus. He began by studying the history of the local mirror glass factory of the Electors and archbishops of Mainz, which was founded in...