The exhibition “Restoration after the fire” provides an insight into the ten years of development and restoration work that became necessary after the devastating fire at the Duchess Anna Amalia Library. An opportunity for Restauro to interview the initiators of the exhibition. Our interviewees are: Professor Ulrike Hähner, Head of the Department of Documents, Books and Graphics at the University of Applied Sciences […].

The exhibition “Restoration after the fire” provides an insight into the ten years of development and restoration work that became necessary after the devastating fire at the Duchess Anna Amalia Library. An opportunity for Restauro to interview the initiators of the exhibition. Our interview partners are:

Professor Ulrike Hähner, Head of the Department of Documents, Books and Graphics at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hildesheim
Dr. Michael Knoche, Director and Dr. Jürgen Weber, Deputy Director and Head of the Conservation Department of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar.

The fire in the library broke out in the evening. How did you react to the news of the fire?
Knoche: After the alarm was raised at around 8:25 p.m., I rushed here immediately – still hoping it was a false alarm – and arrived at about the same time as the fire department, when clouds of smoke were already rising from the roof.

Weber: When I arrived – I was coming from Erfurt – the fire had already broken through the roof of the library. There was a division of labor, so Dr. Knoche was already coordinating the rescue in the building itself – i.e. above ground – while I took care of packing the books in the underground stacks.

Ten years on, how do you assess the process at the time?
Knoche: Everything that happened after 8:30 p.m. actually went well. From raising the alarm and integrating the emergency responders into the rescue process to the great support we received on the night of the fire and in the many days that followed.

The support of the Weimar population is presumably still very strong today?
Knoche: As a princely library, it was perhaps not necessarily close to people’s hearts. Since the fire, the library has gradually become a civic library, where everyone rightly feels they have a part to play in its preservation and reconstruction, and is proud that this building is standing and functioning again.

What was the cause of the fire?
Knoche: The Federal Criminal Police Office has identified a cable fire as the most likely cause of the fire, triggered by 50-year-old installations. The building should actually have been closed for some time. However, due to the rush of users and visitors – especially after the Weimar Year of Culture in 1999 – a closure would have led to a huge uprising.

What conclusions do you draw from this for the future?
Knoche: The first concern of all those responsible for buildings in which culture is stored must be the integrity of the building itself.

Weber: In our experience, detection systems alone are insufficient. The more than 20 fire alarms on the second gallery of the library, where the fire broke out, were triggered too late because the fire was preceded by a smouldering fire. As part of the renovation planning before the fire, it was clear that an active fire extinguishing system would have to be installed. This is difficult in a library museum with a rococo hall, but it was successful. Today, both the public library rooms and the underground stacks are equipped with sprinkler and water mist systems.

How can adequate disaster protection be guaranteed?
Knoche: The safest protection against such disasters is to ensure that the technical precautions are up to date. The second level is organizational emergency protection. You can set up emergency associations, train your own employees, carry out a vulnerability analysis and run through disaster scenarios for every problem.

How important are trained employees for damage prevention?
Knoche: Above all, cultural institutions need employees who identify one hundred percent with their task. This is a problem with external companies that are commissioned with monitoring.

Weber: The library is part of the Weimar emergency network. A 14-strong team from our institution has a particularly good knowledge of the building and its holdings. The library team carries out inspections, checks the emergency boxes and classifies the stock categories. We always have enough transport material in stock for our most valuable collections, so our manuscript stacks, for example, can be cleared immediately. The emergency network also carries out test exercises, for example we recently packed wet books and practiced using fire extinguishers. In emergency network facilities, evacuations are also tested on original parts of the collection, for example to simulate a flood situation.

Hähner: It is important to regularly check the buildings for fire safety and other defects. The parameters to be checked and the inspection intervals must be defined, especially for older buildings. Preventive measures should be a core task of conservation and should be implemented in the day-to-day activities of libraries. However, my study “Damage prevention in everyday library life”, published in 2006, shows that every library deals with this issue differently. In the course of a planned new edition of the book, we want to make more differentiated recommendations.

The exhibition “Restoration after the fire” is a joint project between the library and the university in Hildesheim. How did this come about?
Knoche: The source of the cooperation lies in the scientific project advisory board of the post-fire projects in Weimar, which meets at least once a year. The best practitioners from the restoration scene and the most interesting partners from the universities for restoration science are represented on this committee, also beyond Germany.

Hähner: There has been a partnership between the library and the HAWK since 2007 and it has offered many students opportunities for internships and material for final theses. We have carried out joint project weeks, developed methods for the conservation and restoration of fire-damaged fabric bindings and discussed the presentation of restoration issues with students in the course of preparing the exhibition. The extensive publication, to which students’ final theses also contributed, was produced as part of our cooperation. In addition, comprehensive new restoration studies were carried out in order to record the ten years of interdisciplinary development work in Weimar in the field of volume conservation, and new didactic principles were developed for the comprehensible description and illustration of restoration methods.

What is the difference between volume restoration and individual volume restoration?
Hähner: Restoration is often experienced as a very individual, free activity, but in the context of volume damage, the previously defined objectives must be achieved. The working standards for the damage groups formed must be clearly defined and reproducible – unlike with an individual single object. For example, we explain the development of the methods in the “Conservation and restoration” chapter of the publication. This describes in detail the initial situation, the results of investigations and the development of restoration materials and steps. This methodical approach is not only important for teaching, but can also be taken up by other libraries and applied to their own collections.

As a fire damage manager, you also commission restoration work that is carried out throughout Europe. What conclusions can you draw from the last ten years?
Weber: In addition to cooperating with universities, where we aim to transfer knowledge from practice to teaching and back again, we also award contracts to external workshops. These contracts are put out to tender nationwide and are therefore also recognized throughout Europe. This means that restorers from Estonia, Hungary or Spain are also selected. We follow a strict procedure that is based not only on price, but also on other quality criteria. For example, the awarding of contracts is always linked to a trial restoration, after which we also had to exclude some workshops due to a lack of expertise. Our competition is tough, but objective and has stood up to scrutiny. For us, this is a good way of handling tax and donation funds responsibly and economically.

The interview was conducted by Heike Schlasse.

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The petition for the preservation of written cultural heritage can be signed online here.

On November 19, 2014, the 250th Restoration Colloquium will take place on the topic: Saving the Anna Amalia Library.

You can find out more about the exhibition of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in RESTAURO 7/2014.