“Needless to say, when treatment was so frequent, there could be no question of proper documentation or assessment of the therapy; and that was what happened with your great-uncle too. Besides, said Dr Abramsky, all of the material on file – the case histories and the medical records Fahnstock kept on a daily basis, albeit in a distinctly cursory fashion – have probably long since been eaten by the mice. They took over the madhouse when it was closed and have been multiplying without cease ever since; at all events, on nights when there is no wind blowing I can hear a constant scurrying and rustling in the dried-out shell of the building, and at times, when a full moon rises beyond the trees, I imagine I can hear the pathetic song of a thousand tine upraised throats. Nowadays I place all my hope in the mice, and in the woodworm and deathwatch beetles. The sanatorium is creaking, and in places already caving in, and sooner or later they will bring about its collapse. I have a recurring dream of that collapse, said Dr Abramsky, gazing at the palm of his left hand as he spoke. I see the sanatorium on its lofty rise, see everything simultaneously, the building as a whole and also the minutest detail; and I know that the woodwork, the roof beams, door posts and panelling, the floorboards and staircases, the rails and banisters, the lintels and ledges, have already been hollowed out under the surface, and that at any moment, as soon as the chosen one amongst the blind armies of beetles dispatches the very last, scarcely material resistance with its jaws, the entire lot will come down. And that is precisely what does happen in my dream, before my very eyes, infinitely slowly, and a great yellowish cloud billows out and disperses, and where the sanatorium once stood there is merely a heap of powder-fine wood dust, like pollen.”

P. 112-113, The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald, 1992, translation 1993, Vintage Books 2002, ISBN 9780099448884

On the 3rd of March 2009 the Historical Archives of the City of Cologne, the largest archive in Germany collapsed. A thousand years of German history, from handwritten documents of the Middle Ages, to the private effects of 900 Cologne personalities, authors like Heinrich Böll, Günter Wallraf, Irmgard Keun, the composers Jacques Offenbach and Max Bruch - was all buried under a pile of rubble.

After my mother’s death in London ten years ago, I brought several generations of my families’ effects back to Germany, from where those who survived had fled the Nazis. I decided on specifically this archive because most of the family came from Cologne, and because the effects of my great uncle Wilhelm Unger had already been put in safekeeping there after his death in 1985.

Our personal archive included, not only original scores of my father’s two operas and other musical compositions, and my grandfather’s film scripts, but also photographs and letters of family murdered in Nazi Germany. We have no copies of any of these documents.

A new underground line was being built by the Cologne transport company (KVB), too close to the archive; cracks had been observed, reported and for inconceivable reasons ignored, already long before the catastrophe:

xxxxx“(Dr. Eberhard) Illner had already established cracks from subsidence in the cellar, xxxxxthe summer of last year, and even informed the Archive directors. He was the Archive xxxxxdepartmental director for estates, collections and photography, and now runs the xxxxxHistorical Centre in Wuppertal.” www.bild.de (translation T.U.)

With various media I will be undertaking research and reporting on what has become of the family archive buried under the weight of its own history.