IN 2009, THE HISTORICAL ARCHIVE of the City of Cologne, regarded as the most significant north of the Alps, collapsed, seemingly as a result of negligence in the construction of an underground train line. As the vast majority of its valuable holdings plummeted into the mud below, the archive became visible in wholly unintended ways. Precisely at the point of the archive's catastrophic malfunction, the public saw exactly what had been carefully stored behind the walls of the municipal building they had probably, in many cases, never noticed. Prior to the collapse, the archive had been known in particular for its extraordinary medieval collections, but primarily amongst scholars and specialists. Following the disaster, it was seen in the public eye as never before and, as the extent of the incident and its consequences became apparent, the collapse became an emblem of much more widespread and deep-seated unrest in the city that had developed following various political and financial scandals. Moreover, in this climate, the lost archive triggered public reflection on the city's attitude towards its own identity, heritage, and memory: the lost archive, now nothing more than a “Loch,” a hole or void in the cityscape, became a symbol for Cologne's perceived negligence towards collective and cultural memory. Beyond the implications for the archive holdings, the incident has proved significant because it has provoked people who were otherwise unaware of the archive, or who had assumed the safekeeping of its contents, to think about cultural memory and the effects of its loss on local identity. The collapse and the debates it triggered had both personal and collective resonance, as seen in various citizens’ initiatives and artistic projects developed in response.

This incident, still the topic of heated discussion six years later, shows in dramatic and perhaps emblematic fashion the increased visibility of the archive—in general terms—in the discourse and culture of memory. Moreover, it raises the question how exactly the archive relates to memory, a question that seems particularly urgent in the German context since 1945 and, for this reason, forms the focus of this ninth volume of the Edinburgh German Yearbook.