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.
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?
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?
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.
we were there just last July...beautiful city...Catherdral going under renovation. Amazing to see age old buildings standing....hope the Krauts are able to recover all that valuable history.