Following the death of her mother Sylvia, in London 1998, the artist Tanya Ury, together with other close relatives, decided to donate family documents and papers to the Historical Archives in Cologne, the archive collection known at the time, as the largest this side of the Alps.

Due to negligence, both on the part of builders of a new tramline tunnel in the vicinity but also Archive authorities, who failed to take seriously warning cracks that had appeared in the building, the Historical Archives collapsed on 3.3.2009, and some 900 individual depositories including material dating back a thousand years were folded together with rubble and ruins.

The Ury (Unger) family suffered the loss of a mass of correspondence, dating back from before WW2 until the late 1990’s, historical documents, super 8 films, photographs, original musical scores and many journalistic tape recordings – these being the remaining traces of a family that had been closely involved in the development of German culture, before and after the Second World War. The family archive represented memorabilia belonging to 4 generations of a Jewish-German family of survivors, who had also experienced exile or annihilation at the hands of the Nazis.

2 ½ years later, the Archive authorities of the City of Cologne have confirmed the recovery of some of this material.

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Although Tanya Ury’s great uncle Wilhelm Unger’s personal archive also went missing with the Cologne Archive disaster, after Will’s death in 1984, his library that included many books of particular Jewish historical interest had in its entirety been donated, to the city of Duisburg. Alfred Unger’s personal library, with its many German classics and signed first editions, is now however, unaccounted for. Even if these books are situated in a museum storage unit, somewhere in Germany, in one of the 19 institutions where all salvaged archive material was sent to, following the accident – personal archive owners have been informed it will take some 30 years to sort through and clean everything.

Following the death of Sylvia Ury, apart from historically important documents, which went to the Historical Archives, there remained the question of what to do with her personal library. Each of her three children kept some of the books, one of Tanya Ury’s friends, who dealt in the sale of second hand books, acquired a number, but the question persisted - what to do with the remaining 40 or so boxes? In the eventuality, these were stored for over 10 years in Tanya Ury’s cellar, in Cologne.

The implications of the loss of such a family archive has been far fetching, given that much of this was the last remaining token of a family that was emotionally if not actually destroyed by Nazi Germany. In the face of a sense of trust again having been betrayed in Germany, and a feeling of desperation after the events of the 3rd March 2009, Tanya Ury experienced burn out.

She was not alone – many Archive workers, who were working on the premises the day of the collapse, and barely escaped with their lives, or those historians, whose project studies were ended with the sudden loss of research material, also underwent psychological break-down. The performance with its title burn out refers to emotional exhaustion, as much as obliteration by fire.

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burn out, the action is possibly to be performed at the location of the Fritz-Schramma-Halle, ironically so named by artist/curator Jürgen Stollhans, after the mayor at the time of the collapse of the Archives. The performance is an expression of frustration and rage, by the artist and archive owner Tanya Ury, who has been left bereft of her family testimonial. The ritual burning of her mother’s library (an assortment of bric-a-brac, fusty after years of cellar storage) is intended to draw a parallel to the book burning by Nazi Germans that Ury’s grandfather Alfred experienced as author in Berlin and his brother Wilhelm Unger witnessed as innocent bystander, in Cologne. burn out commemorates their destruction at the time and the contemporary loss of the archive.

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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxburn out, the action

Books are taken out of cardboard boxes by a chorus-team and gradually piled up, like bricks, to form long, wall-like constructions, in a large circle formation, outside the Fritz-Schramma-Halle. These “walls” are unstable and tumble. Chorus members rebuild these, leave the book walls, or start building further arrangements.

All the while, Tanya Ury, the narrator, standing at the centre of the book formations reads from burn out, a poetic text, stopping now and again, to allow pauses, in which each member of the chorus arbitrarily takes a book and reads out a line, or a paragraph from one of the many books.

After 20 minutes or so, small amounts of petrol are squirted onto the piles of books and these are set alight, by a person, dressed in long robes and taking on the role of the priest in the “Nubbelverbrennung” ritual (Nubbel burning), a fetish that is traditionally burned each year at the end of Karneval (to celebrate the end of winter). Spectators have already been advised to stand at some distance from the action (for safety reasons) and the “priest” recites a blessing but also quotes Goebbels with the words “Wir übergeben den Flammen…“ (we give these up to the flames…), an incantation from the time of the book burnings all over Germany, in 1993, while the narrator stands within the ring of fire.

The entire performance is to be documented by 3 video cameras that also film each other – the cameras being part of the action. Inside the hall an extract (5:30 minutes) from the documentary “Verbannte und Verbrannte Kunst” (Banned and Burned Art), by Marianne Tralau, from 1983 is screened (courtesy of Kaos Kunst & Video-Archiv e.V. Cologne) as video-loop. This short clip also consists of a newspaper passage from 1933, about the book burning on 17th May, in the city of Cologne, conducted by students in the name of the National Socialists, on the university premises, and an interview with Wilhelm Unger, who witnessed his own books being burned.