Professor Dr. h.c. Eckart Witzigmann is donating his culinary library containing approximately 6,000 volumes to the German Culinary Archive. This donation provides the archive with its first comprehensive collection of modern culinary literature dating from 1970 onwards, documenting contemporary exquisite culinary art in a manner that allows for the analysis of the evolution of culinary aesthetics and enables further research expansion.

For decades, Eckart Witzigmann has been the doyen of haute cuisine in Germany, revered by many current top chefs at home and abroad as their mentor. He was the first chef in Germany to be awarded three Michelin stars in 1979, and he is one of only four chefs worldwide whom Gault & Millau named Chef of the Century alongside Paul Bocuse, Joël Robuchon, and Frédy Girardet. At 82 years old, Witzigmann currently serves as the patron of the "Ikarus" restaurant in Salzburg, where a different top chef is invited every month to present their menu.

Starting in the 1970s, Witzigmann's collection comprises over 5,000 cookbooks and magazines published since 1970, documenting international haute cuisine worldwide. As top chefs have predominantly published so-called coffee table books in the last 50 years, often in very limited editions, the library contains an unusually large number of high-quality publications that are scarcely available today. Additionally, there are nearly 700 European cookbooks from the 17th to the 20th century included in the collection.