Cologne in Berlin
06 Mar - 11 Apr 2010
COLOGNE IN BERLIN
After the Collapse: The Historical Archive
6 March to 11 April 2010
Organizer: City Cologne and Berliner Festspiele
When the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne caved in on 3 March 2009, there was an outcry in the country. Human lives had been lost, and 90 percent of the valuable contents of the archive was buried beneath the ruins.
Archives are the memory of a community, and the Cologne Archive had long been considered the flagship of German municipal archives. The earliest mention of it dates from 1322, at a time when the whole archive could fit inside a single chest. Written records covering a period of 800 years were kept, restored and studied there. They include the minutes of town council meetings since 1320, papers from the estates of composers like Jacques Offenbach and Max Bruch, the Fluxus artist Mary Bauermeister, the painter Wilhelm Leibl, and the novelist Heinrich Böll, to name but a few.
The Martin-Gropius-Bau has assembled about 100 loans to afford us an initial glimpse of the archive’s treasures, such as a 1258 manuscript of the important work by Albertus Magnus “Liber de animalibus”; the score of “Les cinq soeurs” by Jacques Offenbach; a music manuscript by Hans Werner Henze; documents from the period when Konrad Adenauer was mayor of Cologne; and early manuscripts by the writer and Nobel Literary Laureate Heinrich Böll. The exhibition also documents the collapse of the archive caused by construction work on the city’s underground system.
After the Collapse: The Historical Archive
6 March to 11 April 2010
Organizer: City Cologne and Berliner Festspiele
When the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne caved in on 3 March 2009, there was an outcry in the country. Human lives had been lost, and 90 percent of the valuable contents of the archive was buried beneath the ruins.
Archives are the memory of a community, and the Cologne Archive had long been considered the flagship of German municipal archives. The earliest mention of it dates from 1322, at a time when the whole archive could fit inside a single chest. Written records covering a period of 800 years were kept, restored and studied there. They include the minutes of town council meetings since 1320, papers from the estates of composers like Jacques Offenbach and Max Bruch, the Fluxus artist Mary Bauermeister, the painter Wilhelm Leibl, and the novelist Heinrich Böll, to name but a few.
The Martin-Gropius-Bau has assembled about 100 loans to afford us an initial glimpse of the archive’s treasures, such as a 1258 manuscript of the important work by Albertus Magnus “Liber de animalibus”; the score of “Les cinq soeurs” by Jacques Offenbach; a music manuscript by Hans Werner Henze; documents from the period when Konrad Adenauer was mayor of Cologne; and early manuscripts by the writer and Nobel Literary Laureate Heinrich Böll. The exhibition also documents the collapse of the archive caused by construction work on the city’s underground system.