You have reached the mandatory retirement age of 65 and gave your farewell lecture on 6 June last. High time to have an interview with you! After Itinerario was founded by George Winius and you in 1976, you yourself did many of the interviews. Interviews were and still are rather uncommon in scholarly journals. Why did you start them?

It was a mixture of egoism and curiosity. We meant the journal to be a research journal, so apart from publishing articles we had two things in mind: to speak with prominent people active in the field and also to do special reports on archives and research institutions. George and I loved to ask colleagues about their backgrounds, their personal interests and their approaches to teaching and research. The interviews worked out well, but it turned out to be very difficult to find people who were willing to write about their experiences in foreign archives.