The collapse of an archive building housing Heinrich Böll's personal papers could finally condemn the German author to permanent literary limbo, writes DEREK SCALLYin Berlin

RENÉ BÖLL still cannot comprehend the disaster to hit the legacy of his father, German Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll. On March 3rd the building housing Cologne’s city archive collapsed, killing two and taking the neighbouring buildings with it.

Destroyed in the process were the bulk of the private papers of Heinrich Böll, which his family had handed over to the archive just three weeks earlier after six years of negotiations. They had parted with 22 large cardboard boxes filled with thousands of photographs, letters, notes and other papers related to his writing career and private life.

Included in the boxes were all the photos and papers from Böll's happy time on Achill, immortalised in his 1957 Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal), a book which has shaped how Germans perceive Ireland like no other artistic work.

The collection of papers, for which Cologne had paid €800,000, was stored on the ground floor of the archive when the building on the Severinstrasse collapsed.

“They’re still pulling papers out of the hole in the ground, but we have to conclude that most items have been lost,” says René Böll, his voice somewhere between quiet anger and exhaustion.

Some material has been recovered, he adds, including his father’s 1972 Nobel Prize, but there is no way yet of knowing how much. And even if material is recovered from the chaos, there may be no way of attributing it to his father. Archivists say the newly arrived Böll material had not yet been copied or even properly sorted.

René Böll retained just a small folder of personal documents from his father, and is furious at the dearth of information from the city authorities.

“There will be legal consequences,” he says. “We have a contract with the city that the papers would be restored and always available to us and to researchers.”

Luckily, most of Böll's original manuscripts and documents relating to his published novels were not in the archive at the time of the collapse, nor was original material relating to the Irish Journal.

Nearly two months on, the rescue effort continues on Cologne’s Severinstrasse in what looks like a bomb crater. Volunteers scoop up into plastic buckets random pieces of what was one of Europe’s oldest archives. Material pulled from the rubble may be intact or entirely shredded, and some items are bone dry while others are soaking wet and prone to mould.

The archive contained many irreplaceable historical documents from kaisers and popes going back to the 10th century. Recovered documents believed to be of historical importance are immediately distributed around the country for emergency restoration. The investigation is continuing into the cause of the accident, but many, including René Böll, presume the nearby tunnelling work for a new underground is to blame.

This evening, René Böll will return to the holiday home of his childhood on Achill Island, which is now a writers’ centre. Taking place there is a long-planned event with the now bittersweet title of the Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend.

It was originally planned to discuss issues of German identity 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it’s clear that the programme will be overshadowed by talk of the memory hole in Cologne that has swallowed the missing, presumed lost, Böll papers.

For many friends of Böll, the archive collapse is a reflection of the memory rubble under which modern Germany has buried the Nobel laureate and his work. A towering literary figure in his prime, Böll was known in his later years as much for his public campaigning as his writing. In the 1970s he played a part in the burgeoning green movement and his outspoken criticism of Bonn’s battle with left-wing terrorism saw regular clashes with the West German government and the right-wing press.

But two decades after his death, many Germans resent with a passion Böll’s literary efforts to address thorny issues of German conscience and memory in the burdened post-war years. For two decades, Böll has been condemned to a literary and historical limbo, a fate the loss of his papers may now have sealed.

Given all that, his former home on Achill is an appropriate place to discuss the wider issue of German identity 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Beginning this evening at 7pm and continuing until Sunday, the event is organised by the Böll Society and the Goethe Institute and will feature readings by two German authors, Jan Böttcher and Ulrich Peltzer.

"The accident is the culmination of the awful way that the German people have ditched Heinrich Böll," says author Hugo Hamilton, who will also read at the Achill event from his novel Disguise. "In the 1960s, Germans were full of self-hatred. They've moved on from that but Böll reminds them of that."

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