A previously unpublished archive of letters by Lyonel Feininger, tracing the artist's life from the early Bauhaus through Nazi Germany to exile in America, will lead Ketterer Kunst's rare books auction in Hamburg on 23 November. The correspondence carries an estimate of €150,000 to €250,000 and is the centrepiece of the house's 610th auction.

The leading lot gathers letters exchanged between Feininger and his friend, the art historian Alois J. Schardt, together with correspondence between their families. The archive holds 69 letters addressed to Schardt and 44 exchanged between the families, covering the years 1920 to 1955. More than fifty original woodcuts by Feininger are printed on the letters, with pen-and-ink drawings adding to their character as artworks in their own right.

Feininger, born in New York in 1871 to German parents, was appointed to the Bauhaus by Walter Gropius in 1919 and became one of the school's defining figures. The letters begin in the pioneering Weimar years, continue through the political upheaval of the 1930s, and extend into his final creative period in New York after he emigrated in 1937, the same year the National Socialists confiscated more than 400 of his works. Ketterer Kunst describes the archive as a record of museum-level importance.

The evening sale around it ranges widely. A near-complete run of Camera Work, Alfred Stieglitz's photographic quarterly from 1903 to 1914, is estimated at €60,000, while illuminated manuscripts include a Franciscan breviary from northern Italy, estimated at €40,000, and a Flemish Book of Hours of about 1480 to 1500 at the same figure. A hand-coloured Atlas maior by Frederick de Wit, made in Amsterdam around 1700, carries a €50,000 estimate. Public previews run from 16 to 20 November and on 22 November.