Preservation in Perspective
How can we preserve written materials for future generations?
Eine virtuelle Ausstellung von
Preservation in Ten Objects
Much of the basis of knowledge, culture and history lies in written documents. Their materiality puts these objects at risk: water, dirt, mould, pests and chemical deterioration processes consume their physical substances. Archives, libraries and their affiliated institutions hold responsibility for safeguarding written cultural heritage and preserving it for the long term. This responsibility can only be met collectively, across the boundaries of Germany’s 16 Länder and those between professional disciplines alike.
The Coordination Office for the Preservation of Written Cultural Heritage (KEK) was founded in 2011 to support this cooperation. It promotes the preservation of archives and collections, systematically gathers data and raises awareness of preservation’s importance outside specialist circles. Over the past decade, a broad range of written documents have been safeguarded thanks to two funding programmes, the KEK’s pilot project funding programme and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media’s Special Programme. We are showcasing ten objects here that exemplify the many facets of preservation work at archives, libraries and museums.
01
Carved in wax
Today, we tend to associate wax with candles or cosmetics. In Europe, however, it was still used as a medium for writing as late as the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. In salt-producing regions, important records were kept on wax, which withstood the salty air around the production sites particularly well.
The Halle City Archives hold several books of wax tablets bearing ownership records and feudal legal arrangements related to the four brine springs at Hallmarkt square. The books look their age, with many scratches, deposits, and cracks as a result of dehydration. Some of the tablets have slipped out of their frames entirely.
The restored wax tablet book reveals how many members of Halle’s middle classes, such as the influential Oleariuses, a family of Protestant theologians, benefited financially from salt production during the period of the book’s creation. Towns such as Lüneburg and Schwäbisch-Hall likewise owed their prosperity to salt production.
Wax tablets did have an inherent disadvantage, however. They were easy to manipulate, which made it necessary to maintain three copies of each of the books. The annual procedure of comparing the copies, resolving old entries, and adding new ones – "keeping the loan book", as this was called in a 1793 description and history of the Halle Saltworks – was accompanied by festivities.
02
A palpable horse
Its many pieces can be fitted together thanks to metal hinges, pins and fastenings. Some 3,700 paper labels with French inscriptions are affixed throughout the organs, muscles and veins. In a 2019-2020 KEK pilot project, restorators cleaned these inscriptions, making them readable once again. In addition, the Central Repository scanned all the individual components and rendered a digital 3D model.
03
Words on silk
The silk scrolls from the holdings of the Leipzig University Library are atypical for written material: the writing surface is silk rather than paper. These Chinese legal documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth century record the imperial chancery’s appointments of civil servants. The scrolls themselves are often large-scale, and they involve complex combinations of fabric and paper. Restoring them in a 2019 KEK pilot project constituted an immense challenge: how should this mixture of media be treated?
Scroll no. 403 concludes with a broad, uninscribed strip that protects the text inside, comparable to the flyleaf of a printed book. Extremely delicate strips of gilded paper are woven into the red silk fabric.
"The restoration of this mixture of silk and paper was only possible because textile restorators cooperated extremely closely with paper restorators."
- Almuth Märker, PhD, Leipzig University Library
04
Germany’s very first email
On 3 August 1984 at 10.14 am, an email with the subject line “Willkommen in CSNET” (Welcome to CSNET) arrived in Michael Rotert’s inbox. This may sound unremarkable today, but it was a milestone in communication history: the first email ever received in Germany. It is worth noting that the message has not survived digitally, but only on paper. The original digital version has been lost. Indeed, files share the same fate as texts written on paper or parchment. They are all ephemeral and can be deleted or become unreadable. Archiving of digital copies, but also "born-digital" documents, is a complex challenge.
05
The quest for the Gospel truth
This object requires detective work. All the original manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, including the four canonical Gospels, are considered lost. The Bible as we know it is based on 5,500 later copies that are now scattered around the world. Using these, researchers are endeavouring to reconstruct the original text word for word. Some 155 of these copies are located in Germany, 22 of them at the Bible Museum of the University of Münster.
Today, the reconstructed editions of the New Testament are used worldwide by all major churches and educational establishments. They are also the basis of most modern Bible translations. To grant scholars access to these copies, three of them were restored in a 2018 KEK pilot project.
The parchment bearing the text of the Gospels, dating from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, had been heavily damaged and soiled. Some of the pages had fallen prey to bacteria, and the richly illuminated miniatures in one of the three manuscripts had decomposed. The bindings were also in poor condition. Restoration was urgently needed.
After the restoration work, the manuscripts were digitised, transcribed and indexed. The enhanced digital versions can be viewed in the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room, a cooperation between the Bible Museum and the Institute for New Testament Textual Research at the University of Münster.
06
Bremeniana and poets
In the spirit of the Enlightenment, the scholar Johann Philipp Cassel (1707–1783) sought to amass a broad range of knowledge. His library is correspondingly varied and contains a unique collection of New and Medieval Latin from the incunabula period to the eighteenth century, known as the Poetae collection.
Another segment of the library consists of several hundred items known as Bremensien, or Bremeniana. The term gives a hint as to their content: these works are concerned with the city and former duchy of Bremen as well as adjoining territories. Today, Cassel’s books and papers are in the safekeeping of the State and University Library Bremen.
Dry cleaning
Many of the vulnerable volumes from Cassel’s collection are off limits to use. Therefore, the goal of preservation efforts as part of the BKM Special Programme, conducted in 2018 and 2019, was to protect them physically. To that end, the bodies and bindings of the books were initially "dry-cleaned". In this restorative process, soiled writing materials are mechanically cleaned using suitable cleaning brushes, latex sponges and suction devices. The dry-cleaning process was carried out manually at specially equipped secure ("clean") workbenches.
Protective packaging
Next, the volumes were transferred to tailor-made protective cases, which were sealed on all sides to protect their contents from dust and light. These can also mitigate the effects of fluctuating environmental conditions. To avoid harming the objects, the cases must be constructed from durable materials that are free of both acid and wood pulp.
07
Drawing on the past
The landscape architect Hans Schmidt (1879–1958) moved to Dessau in 1918. Until the Second World War, he played a crucial role in shaping the city’s appearance. Schmidt’s plans, created in the tradition of the historic Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz, further connect to questions of landscape design for our own era, especially in regions shaped by industry. The drawings at the Municipal Archive Dessau-Roßlau could be useful for implementing reconstruction measures. When new urban planning projects emerge, they give clues into the structure of the city as it evolved historically.
Because he designed municipal parks and green-space areas and sometimes taught at the university level, Schmidt also worked for institutions of the Nazi regime from 1933 onward. However, according to research, he kept his distance from the Nazi Party. After the war, he was therefore able to resume teaching in Dessau.
In many instances, the drawings and plans among Schmidt’s papers are the sole extant portrayals of important parts of the Dessau cityscape before the Second World War. Most of them portray private gardens, urban green spaces, cemeteries and the grounds of factories and other facilities.
The poor condition of the drawings, which were made on tracing paper and glassine, complicate their use. In a 2016 KEK pilot project, 100 garden plans and drawings were restored. Urban planners, researchers, municipal decision-makers and the public can now make use of the plans once again.
08
Radically rural
This poster is unequivocal about the threat the potato beetle poses to East German agriculture. It is one of 1,205 items in the collection of the Teltow-Fläming District and Administrative Archives, which is located in Luckenwalde, a town in Brandenburg. Through its references to rural Brandenburg between 1948 and 1961, the collection reflects cultural, social and political developments in the region from the post-war period to the early history of the German Democratic Republic (better known as East Germany). These artefacts illuminate the resumption of cultural life after the war and the introduction of a socialist lifestyle in rural areas.
Three "pestilent fleas" were scourging the world and jeopardising peace: Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill and Konrad Adenauer, all of them styled as "spoilers of humanity". During the Cold War, hyperbolic posters such as these were the ideal format for communicating memorable messages. In this case, East German citizens were being warned that Germany could meet a similar fate to Korea.
Although that danger is now past, the object still merits preservation. To ensure that these political posters retain their radiance a century from now, they were de-acidified and professionally packaged in a 2020 KEK pilot project.
09
Treasures of a polymath
Moisture, mould and pressure can cause pages to stick together, forming a solid block of paper. It is often very difficult to separate stuck-together pages mechanically. This can lead to the formation of slabs and fragments or other types of severe and irreversible damage.
10
Messages from exile
German-speaking exiles were anything but silent from 1933 to 1945. They made their voices heard in around 450 magazines. From cultural politics to literature to scholarship, the periodicals’ content was as varied as their physical shapes and sizes. Copies of these publications, produced around the world, comprise a unique and valuable source for research. Some 34,000 magazines of this kind are stored at the German National Library’s two locations. From 2020 to 2021, as part of the BKM Special Programme, around 13,450 of the magazines were cleaned, processed for conservation and repackaged.
The headlines of the exile magazine Aufbau – "Pogrom Recorded on Film", "Rothschild Bank Liquidated", "Synagogue Becomes Indoor Swimming Pool" – offered candid glimpses of the articles’ harrowing content. This German-language weekly was published in New York City starting in December 1935. The edition dated 3 May 1940 includes these and other articles about Jews’ worsening disenfranchisement. But the content extends beyond these themes as well, and includes guidance on emigration planning, information about cultural life, such as the programme of the German-Jewish Club, and language learning opportunities. The issue also features advertisements for ship passage, emigration advice and job opportunities.
During the Nazi dictatorship, many German-speakers, most of them Jewish, were forced to emigrate. Around eighteen to twenty thousand of them found refuge in Shanghai. Learning English was an important aspect of their new day-to-day lives. In Shanghai, the refugees used the magazine Die Tribüne to hone their language skills. It was published from February to May 1940 with a print run of around 1,000 copies.
In the October 1940 edition, the "Little by Little" column explained English idioms. Just a few pages later, the tailor Emanuel Kohn and the Malkischer orthopaedic workshop advertised their services. The issue also contains literary contributions by Heinrich Man ("The Power of the Word") and Anton Kuhn ("Pallenberg on Hitler").
#10YearsKEK
Since its establishment in 2011, the Coordination Office for the Preservation of Written Cultural Heritage (KEK) has supported the preservation of these ten objects and many more in archives, libraries and museums throughout Germany. This is made possible thanks to funding from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and the Cultural Foundation of the German Federal States, which represents Germany’s 16 Länder on a collective basis.
In 2021, we broadened our horizons. At the international conference Preservation in Perspective, held on 23 and 24 November 2021 at the James Simon Gallery on Berlin’s Museum Island and online, we discussed the future of preservation beyond Germany’s borders together with experts from Europe and the US.
After all, #10YearsKEK is only the beginning.
Eine virtuelle Ausstellung von
Team
Timm Wille
Lilian Pithan
Timm Wille (text, design, photo editing), Ursula Hartwieg, Lilian Pithan, Sonja Wallis (text editing), Jake Schneider (translation)
Impressum
Koordinierungsstelle für die Erhaltung des schriftlichen Kulturguts (KEK)
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