In this thesis, we study an object which, despite the great interest it presents, only little attention has been paid: anthologies of authors. In our first chapter, we try to define the theoretical field which determines our reflections by outlining, in the first place, the most important aspects of literary theories concerning the canon and, in a second step, exploring the notion of ‘museum’ that will guide our reflections throughout our paper. Our corpus includes three French-speaking and three German-speaking authors (André Gide, Paul Éluard and André Breton on the French side, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rudolf Borchardt and Walter Benjamin on the German/Austrian one). Analyzing and interpreting their collections of poetry and prose, assembled with very different objectives, constitutes the core of our study. We observe that for the German-speaking authors, it’s the concept of ‘nation’ that takes the most prominent place in their work; deriving from a sentiment of crisis in the 1920s and 30sand of the lack of an identity frame that could unite Germany. Whilst a great part of their editorial work consists in an effort to establish that idea of a common German identity, the French authors on the other hand, confronted with a substantially different consciousness of crisis, try to develop a more literary solution. At the end of our study, we try to unite the different aspects of our interpretation by refining the idea of a “museum of literature” as it presents itself in the texts analyzed.