Begin forwarded message:
From: dasg...@aol.com
Date: March 6, 2009 6:40:40 PM PST
To: ramille...@aol.com
Cc: ema...@aol.com, j...@aol.com, jim6...@cwnet.com
Subject: Un-Writing History -- Records of WWII & Postwar Germany Lost
Forever, No Copies
HISTORY IN RUINS
Archive Collapse a Disaster for Historians
By Andrew Curry
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,611311,00.html
The collapse of the Historical Archive of Cologne on Tuesday buried
more than a millenium's worth of documents under tons of rubble.
Archivists and historians hope something can be salvaged, but the
future of the city's past is grim.
Disaster struck in Cologne on Tuesday, as the building housing the
city's Historical Archive suddenly collapsed. According to city
officials, two people are officially missing and believed dead. And
hundreds of firefighters were on the scene Wednesday looking for
survivors as Cologne historians and archivists mourned the apparent
destruction of Germany's largest municipal archive.
"It's an inconceivable loss," Eberhard Illner, a former archivist for
the city, told the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper. "It's a
catastrophe, not just for the city of Cologne but for the history of
Europe." Cologne's archives are one of the only collections in Germany
to have survived World War II completely intact. Because of Cologne's
long history, much of its heritage was stored locally rather than in a
state archive.
On Tuesday night and Wednesday, archivists worked alongside
firefighters and rescue personnel. According to an archivist and
historian with firsthand knowledge of the situation, volunteers have
already pulled close to 9,000 documents out of the building's basement
and the offices of archive employees. "It's possible that in the
spaces between the rubble, some more items may have survived," the
source, who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to
speak to the press, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "That would be really
wonderful."
Cologne's history goes back more than 2000 years, when it was the
Roman city of Colonia. In the Middle Ages, the city's prime spot along
the Rhine River made it one of northern Europe's trading powerhouses,
part of the Hanseatic League and a gateway between France and Germany.
The Historical Archives contained extensive documentation from the
city's Hanseatic period, as well as the archives of other Hanseatic
League members, invaluable for historians looking at Europe's economic
development.
The sheer numbers -- in total, the building had more than 18
kilometers of shelves -- reflect the rich history of what was once
Germany's largest metropolis. The archive's collection of original
documents included thousands from Cologne's golden age. The founding
charter of the University of Cologne, signed in 1388, was inside,
along with the documents that established Cologne as a free imperial
city under Emperor Friedrich III in 1475. Two of the four manuscripts
in the hand of Albertus Magnus, considered the greatest German
theologian of the Middle Ages, were kept in the archive's rare books
collection.
For historians trying to reconstruct the past, the greatest loss may
be the more quotidian papers: Tens of thousands of receipts issued by
the city government between 1350 and 1450, for example, or the 358
volumes of decisions and minutes of the Cologne City Council dating
back 700 years.
The archives also contained the personal papers of almost 800
prominent Germans -- authors, politicians and composers, including
Konrad Adenauer, the first post-war chancellor of Germany. The
manuscripts and letters of Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll and
Jacques Offenbach, a 19th century cellist and opera composer, were
stored at the archive. Weimar Republic politician Wilhelm Marx and
German-Jewish composer Ferdinand Hiller were among the other notables
whose collections have been buried under tons of concrete. "These are
fragile papers, that are now ground to dust," Illner told the daily.
And somewhere underneath the rubble lie the remains of 500,000
photographs of the city and its people, an irreplaceable visual record
of life in Germany's fourth largest city. Likewise, more than 100,000
architectural drawings and plans may have been destroyed.
There may be no way to recover the lost collections. Large parts of
the pre-1945 documents were put on microfilm and stored in a bunker in
the Black Forest, but according to Illner the microfilm is of poor
quality. And the post-war collections have no back-up at all.
From the outside, the Historical Archive certainly looked
indestructible. The bunker-like concrete structure was built in 1971,
with a raw concrete façade and slit-like windows. Designers hoped the
mass of concrete would keep the temperature inside constant without
expensive air conditioning systems, an archive design that became
known as the "Cologne model."
Yet just weeks before the collapse, the archive organized a symposium
to talk about the building's shortcomings. In the decades since its
construction, the building had run out of space, and some of its
secondary collections were housed in rented spaces nearby. The
building's thick concrete turned out to trap heat, and in the
unusually hot summers of 2003 and 2006 temperatures in parts of the
archive topped 85 degrees, potentially disastrous for fragile
documents and the wax seals that adorn some of the 65,000 original
documents dating back to 922 AD in the archive's collection. Until a
few years ago, the archive's 26 workers shared a single Internet
connection.
That's all irrelevant now, of course. As rescue crews struggle to
secure the ruins -- pumping concrete into the spaces below ground to
stabilize the rubble -- archivists are hoping more can be salvaged
from the wreckage. Firefighters said Wednesday it was unlikely they
would find any survivors.
The head of the city's fire department, Stephan Neuhoff, said
officials believe the building's collapse may be related to the
construction of a subway beneath the same street where the archive is
located.
This isn't the first time a major German archive has been hit by
disaster. In 2004, the Anna Amalia Archive in Weimar lost 70,000 books
in a fire. "Unlike a fire or a flood, lots of people hope that the
stuff isn't totally destroyed," Jurgen Weise, a historian at the
Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, or Rhineland-Westfalen
Economic Archive, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "It's possible we might be able
to rescue it, but it could start raining at any time." Archivists hope
the city can put a roof or shelter over the ruins as quickly as
possible -- and then see if any of the city's history can be salvaged.
Need a job? Find employment help in your area.
