August 2001 - Nr. 8
UNESCO Says Goethe Papers Belong on "Memory of the World" Register
TWIG - The international cultural organization UNESCO wants to include the literary estate of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in its Memory of the World program, a campaign to promote and preserve the creative documents that have helped shape history. Also nominated for the program this year are Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, filmmaker Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and the achievements of Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the first printing press with moveable type. The international advisory committee for the project announced the new candidates Thursday (June 28) at the close of its conference in Cheongju City, South Korea. UNESCO will make the final selection for the list this fall.
A complement to the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage register, the Memory of the World list is designed to bring greater recognition to historic works preserved in archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions. Goethe’s papers, held in the Goethe and Schiller Archives in Weimar, were nominated for their significance as a "comprehensive document of world literature," the advisory committee reported. The manuscript for the poetry collection Westoestlicher Diwan has been selected to represent the estate, and is to be posted on the Internet in German and in English and French translation. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, according to the committee, exerted a major influence on the symphony as a musical form, and Lang’s silent film Metropolis made film history with its breathtaking cinematic and architectural vision of the future The invention of the printing press, selected as a breakthrough in European cultural technology that encouraged the spread of literacy, will be represented by the Gutenberg Bible at the State and University Library of Lower Saxony in Goettingen, and by the holdings of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz.
A complete list of nominees for the program can be found on the Memory of the World web page at http://www.unesco.org/webworld/mdm.
