Remember that old joke about the poor woman who got involved four times in search of Mr Right and always came away disappointed after she took up with an English cook, an Italian politician, a French engineer, and a German lover. Well the English can still eat toad in a hole and spotted dick, the Italians are on their 52nd post-war government, the French can still design subs that run into other subs in the open ocean, and the (north) Germans still get low marks as romantic types. But on March 4, 2009 the Germans lost their right to make fun of anybody else’s engineering skills. For on that day the 8-story building housing the entire archive of the historic city of Köln collapsed into a devastated pancake as if it had been blown up by explosive experts.
But it hadn’t been. It had been undermined by the construction of a new subway line, despite numerous warnings from the building’s occupants that the building was being shaken into fundamental danger by the nearby construction. The warnings were ignored and the building collapsed so quickly that it was a miracle that all the occupants of the building managed to rush out before it pancaked. It turned out that the mayor was incompetent, the engineers were hopeless, the bureaucracy had not functioned and there’s nothing more to be said about the lovers. That leaves only the archivists and the restorers to pick up the pieces, and they still seem to be competent. But those pieces are proving very difficult to find in the crushed rubble that must be bottoming out in ground water that will not even be reached for many months. Experts are now predicting that this engineering fiasco has already resulted in the destruction of many irreplaceable pieces of history going back almost 2000 years and ultimately it will prove to be the biggest disaster for German history since the bombings of World War 2.