"An unprecedented cultural and historical disaster"

REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

Cologne's archive collapse called 'cultural catastrophe'

Hundreds of thousands of documents and items, some dating back to the Middle Ages, were buried when the six-story building collapsed, and two people are missing and feared dead. The other employees and visitors escaped before the building crumbled to the ground.
[...]
In addition, the building housed papers belonging to Konrad Adenauer, West Germany's first postwar chancellor, who signed the reparations agreement with Israel; correspondences by the poet Paul Celan, author of "Death Fugue"; and papers of the writer Guenther Grass, also a Nobel laureate, and of Gottfried Boehm, a recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize; as well as the archive of a newspaper edited by Karl Marx.

This is devastating.

I used to think about memory as something personal, private, and arbitrary - serendipitous remembering, reluctant forgetting, and vice versa, all at your own pace. Not so. As a librarian-in training, I've learned to appreciate the immense effort, sustained over a hundred lifetimes, that goes into preserving a cultural heritage. And yet, I worry sometimes about the quality of our memories. Should we preserve the @So-and-so Twitter updates between politicians and celebrities as the modern equivalent of literary correspondence? To do so is like comparing a non-stick pan flaking cancerous shards of its coating to an old-school cast-iron skillet.

It pains me to think about all hundreds of thousands of skillets being forgotten in Cologne.