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.
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.
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.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,611311,00.html
