Vicente Gregorio Quesada was an Argentinian lawyer (awarded the title of Dr. jur. in 1850). He was a politician (1856, congressman in the Province of Corrientes; 1877, Interior Minister in the Province of Buenos Aires), founded a newspaper, worked as a diplomat (from 1883 to 1904 in Brazil, the United States, Mexico, the Vatican, Spain, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia) and as a library director (appointed director of the Biblioteca Nacional de Buenos Aires in 1871).
His son Ernesto Quesada was an Argentinian politician, lawyer (awarded the title of Dr. jur. in 1882), library director (director of the Biblioteca Nacional de Buenos Aires from 1877 to 1878) and sociologist (appointed professor of sociology at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1904). In 1928 Ernesto Quesada bequeathed his private library containing approx. 80,000 volumes to the state of Prussia, including a large manuscript collection. This gift paved the way for the foundation of the Ibero-American Institute (IAI) of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in 1930 in Berlin. Part of the bequest and the collection of manuscripts on the history of Argentinian law are believed to have been destroyed in the war or gone missing. The current papers comprise documents and correspondence from the latter part of Ernesto Quesada’s life. He took these papers with him to Switzerland in 1928 and they did not pass into the ownership of the IAI until after his death in 1934. These were followed by other materials in 1939 and 1940, after the death of Leonore Niessen Deiters.
Leonore Niessen Deiters (1879-1939) was Ernesto Quesada’s second wife. She was a German writer. The newspaper Kölnische Zeitung published many of her articles between 1913 and 1920. Part of Leonore Niessen Deiters’ papers are stored in the archive of the Rheinischen Literaturarchiv (Heinrich-Heine-Institut). 

Material:

• 41 cases, 9 folders
• manuscripts
• poems
• notes
• documents
• correspondence (general and family correspondence)
• 154 letters (correspondence with Oswald Spengler; acquired second-hand in 1993)
• over 100 photographs (some pasted into photo albums)
• portrait photos (4 cases)
• newspaper articles
• 635 coins and medals
• 1 nude life drawing

Keywords: Argentina, history, history of the IAI, philosophy