(there is a version of this with the 0bama logo being removed from over the hole)
Posted on 03/04/2009 8:09:43 AM PST by Mike Fieschko
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.
... 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. ...
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. ...
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
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 [a former archivist for the city] the microfilm is of poor quality. And the post-war collections -- including records from the Cologne Art Association used to track the provenance of artworks -- have no back-up at all.
ping
This is an interesting contrast with America, where we shovel most of our history into a hole because Whitey played too big a positive role.
Oh No that’s where Obama’s they kept Obama’s Birth original certificate, wink wink
Obama’s fault.
Why worry? Just ask the history department at Harvard to rewrite it all. They have plenty of experience.
The building just.......collapsed? Do they have many buildings over there that just......collapse?
Obama hates Germans!
How terrible! This is a genealogist’s nightmare. I wonder what caused the building to collapse and why it wasn’t noticed that it was ready to collapse before it did?
Work was being done on a new subway line under the street on which the building stood. The roof of the subway construction site also collapsed Tuesday, but officials said they did not believe anyone was trapped in there.
Subway project leader Rolf Papst also said there had been no major tunneling work done in the last 30 days.
Could they be keeping something from the public ?
Perhaps a bomb ?
Presumably it collapsed under the weight of the 18 kilometers of loaded shelves. But per previous stories, adjacent construction of a subway had been causing various problems for a few years, including a church that ended up with its tower leaning 3 feet to one side. When I first saw the story, I assumed the building was some historic structure, but it was actually built in 1971.
A genealogist also.
Have also been to Koln.
Germany has some of the best records for genealogist,
far better than England.
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Thanks Mike Fieschko. Gotta be due to the US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. ;') |
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I know the Mormons do extensive work with genealogy. My dad motors down to SLC all the time to delve into their records. My paternal grandmother’s people were German. This is such a loss.
And he would agree with you SoCalPol. The English records can be not so great.
Not LDS, just a person for several decades interested in History and love research.
As old as England is, they didn’t start census until 1841.
the U.S. 1790.
(ok, I know, Domesday Survey could count as a type of census for England early on.)
Am sure your dad will agree, Genealogy is a disease.
Devastating. As a relatively new student of medieval and renaissance martial arts, this is really, really bad news. The early German fechtbuchs are key to this research and they were all too hard to find already. This won’t help.
I think those records are available to anyone. My folks spent some time in England, doing some research. Dad said they have better stuff in SLC. But I know he is in contact with a person in London who does some research. For a fee of course. I haven’t asked him how that is going.
(there is a version of this with the 0bama logo being removed from over the hole)
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