Nobel Laureate Heinrich Boll's Private Papers Destoryed in Freak Accident
Posted on March 6, 2009
Nobel Laureate Heinrich Boll's private papers have been lost to history after a building collapsed. It has taken almost a decade for Boll's heirs to work out a deal with the city of Cologne to ensure the safe transfer of the papers to the state archives. Now the incredibly valuable collection may be totally ruined after the archive building totally collapsed. The collapse was caused by a nearby building project which destroyed the archive's foundations.
Three weeks ago, city officials held a special ceremony to mark the historic handover: for 800,000 Euros (712,000 pounds sterling), the Cologne archives took possession of hundreds of boxes containing items ranging from Boll's school reports to scripts of his radio plays, novels and essays by Germany's most popular post-second world war writer, who died in 1985 at the age of 67. But his papers and unpublished works may have been lost for ever after the collapse of the archives building this week.None of the collection was ever archived or copied. Apparently it was safer sitting the moldy basement all those years. Academics and historians are calling the loss is equivalent to the loss of irreplaceable medieval documents that were destroyed during Allied bombing during World War II. The loss of life and loss of the valuable literary documents are a real tragedy.The six-storey building was demolished on Tuesday after its foundations caved in under the strain of a nearby building project. Excavation experts are still searching the site for two people believed to have been caught in the collapse. They say it is probable that the papers have been lost under the concrete, steel and glass rubble.
Lost, too, were photographs and 80,000 letters - including 2,400 written to his wife Annemarie - all of which had been stored for years in a damp cellar of the Bolls' home. Experts fear that even if the documents were not entirely crushed in the collapse, ground water and soil which has seeped into the hole left by the destroyed foundations will have ruined them. Restoration experts said the longer it took rescue workers to remove the rubble, the higher the danger that mould would attack the manuscripts.