Cologne city archives update

More on yesterday's disaster, via Der Spiegel:

"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". . .

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.

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. In total, the building had more than 18 kilometers of shelves.

The archives also contained the personal papers of almost 800 prominent German authors, politicians and composers, including Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll and Jacques Offenbach, a 19th century cellist and opera composer. 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.

Almost nothing of all this photographed or otherwise backed up, of course. The loss is all the greater given how Cologne was so thoroughly destroyed during WW2; now the main record of what Cologne once was is gone, too.

ADDENDUM: Where is the NY Times on this? One small AP article yesterday, titled "2 Are Missing After Cologne Building Collapses", with absolutely no mention in the following text even hinting at the significance of the loss.

FOR those with German, you may wish to keep up with this grim story via Archivalia.

Posted by David on March 4, 2009 10:24 AM