News"Book Pastor" Martin Weskott and his archive for the...

"Book Pastor" Martin Weskott and his archive for the world

When Martin Weskott saw mountains of unkindly disposed of books in the 90s, his heart broke. He decides to save as many as possible – and has easily cracked the million mark

An eyesore ”, says Klaus Hermann frankly and adds that this is actually still too friendly a description. For 30 years nothing has changed in this desolate sight from his neat house in the Thuringian town of Plottendorf to the site of the former brickworks. He has been the mayor of the Treben community 40 kilometers south of Leipzig for almost as long.

The nest gained sad notoriety in 1991 when newspaper photos of books from the former GDR that were thrown away in the garbage in the newspaper gave a red anger to the face and, in the good Lutheran tradition, he went to the place of barbarism: Here I stand now and cannot different.

See you again at the place of iniquity. We accompany Martin Weskott, pastor of the Protestant Johannesgemeinde in Katlenburg near Göttingen until autumn 2017 to where it all started. Where he spontaneously picks up as many totally filthy books at random as can fit in his trunk “on a drive”. Over the years, there have been at least 150 such journeys in station wagons, a VW Bulli and occasionally with a borrowed truck.

In an old stone barn on the imposing church area, unimaginable amounts of books have piled up. Certainly a million, says the man with the distinctive full beard and smiles. The castle hill has long been called “the book castle” and Weskott is the “book pastor”. The literary savior was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit for the meticulousness with which he and his volunteer supporters made the unique collection accessible to the public. Perhaps even more important to him was the award of the Karl Preusker Medal, with which services to public libraries are generally recognized.

Weskott’s book barn is beyond all dimensions. The pastor, who was hungry for literature, also saved many unknown authors from the “burial” of their works, said the writer Friedrich Dieckmann in his laudation at the time.

Summer 1991. In Plottendorf, Martin Weskott looks for the first time through the perforated fence of the former open-cast mine that has been repurposed as a rubbish dump. Thousands of books from East German production are rotting away, many of them still originally sealed. New copies from formerly “state-owned” publishers literally end up in the trash. Classics as well as contemporary literature. Decayed works are piled meters high, which suddenly appeared unsaleable with the dawn of the new era and have had their day. Among them are well-known GDR authors such as Stefan Heym, Christoph Hein, Walter Janka, Brigitte Reimann. But also works by Heinrich Mann, Dostojewski or the Czech Nobel Prize winner Jaroslav Seifert. Not individual remainder copies, but total editions fresh off the press.

The heart of the book lover Martin Weskott bleeds at this sight. And that he has to witness how the “reading country GDR”, about which the culture superiors so gladly raved about, so to speak, abolishes itself. Under the pressure of economic conditions and out of the obedience of some overzealous people. The memories just gush out of the pastor.

“The books were piled up by the tens of thousands, as if spat out by the manure spreader.” The outrage comes up again in such situations. Like when he discovered that inside the former brickworks, whole pallets of books in their original packaging were waiting for their final disposal. “You can’t call that anything other than targeted destruction.” In the rubbish book he comes across titles that were only recently on the black list, including Stefan Heym’s selection volume “Stalin leaves the room”. And high-quality illustrated books that the GDR was once proud of. What he transports away in large plastic bags he calls “a kind of sample collection”. Many books have long since set mold and show signs of rats gnawing. Sometimes the layer of dirt can be laboriously removed at home in the book castle.

It is a very special patina that the volumes rescued from their final destruction have put on. Not surprisingly, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, but also Marx landed on the literal rubbish heap of history. Most of it, however, is evidently not discarded because of suspicion of ideology: Hegel, Shakespeare, comics, children’s books, stacks of travel guides (to cope with literary wanderlust, so to speak). In addition, cookbooks and school books for physics, biology and music lessons. And advice such as “Trabant – how do I help myself?”

To person

Martin Weskott , (69), was pastor of the evangelical St. Johannes parish in Katlenburg in the district of Northeim in Lower Saxony for almost 40 years. He is a member of the PEN Center Germany.

He became known for his book rescue campaign after the fall of the Wall in the GDR. Weskott has regularly invited ostracized and forgotten authors (“garbage writers”) to readings.

Around a million books are stored in his “book barn”. They are sold cheaply and the proceeds go to “Bread for the World”. A six-figure amount has come together so far. bk

Mayor Hermann lives just a stone’s throw away from the old clay factory, which produced sewer pipes until the 1970s. The trained ceramist also made a small contribution to saving books in the turmoil after the fall of the Wall and made use of the garbage literature. “It was literally public property,” he says with a smile. He fetches three titles from the bookcase that wonderfully illustrate everything that was intended for the shredder: There is Böll’s “House without Guardian” in a GDR licensed edition next to the children’s book “Förster Grünrock tells”, which has long enjoyed cult status and the illustrated book ” Dresden before 1945 ”. Hermann did not want to simply hand over a few curiosities such as “Information for the agitator” to the Orcus.

Weskott’s book sanctuary is a mighty, ancient tithe barn. A warehouse for storing the so-called tax in kind. It smells of dust, wood, printer’s ink and of course paper. At some point the refectory of the former monastery was no longer able to cope with the mass of books, and the “Society for the Promotion of Culture and Literature” founded by the pastor took over the barn as a refuge for books. It was no longer just about rescued GDR stocks. From the mid-1990s onwards, the spectrum expanded continuously with bequests and offers from publishers. Not a common subject that would not be represented in the printed works piled up like mountains. And hardly a sought-after title with a rarity value that the landlord would not track down in this jungle with inquiries with a little lead time. It’s amazing how he finds his way around this bizarre landscape from nothing but books without GPS. Regulars like to tell you that you can always find something in the barn that you weren’t really looking for.

Katlenburg has never been a place of longing. As much as Weskott feels connected to East German literature since he spent many vacations as a youth from the west across the border in the Thuringian parsonage of his grandfather. But the busy book pastor has made the cute and homely-looking Katlenburg into a polyglot place.

From here he has equipped Goethe Institutes and libraries in many countries around the world over the years. Inquiries reach him from all corners of the world. Even space travel took up expertise from the book barn. 25 years ago, in 1996, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research looked for specialist literature on magnesium silicate. It was about the Cassini space probe on its way to Saturn. What they could not find anywhere they finally found in Weskott’s shelves. And so it happened that the good news from Katlenburg caused a sensation when the probe was launched even in distant Cape Canaveral.

Theologically, however, Weskott, formally retired for four years, has always remained an advocate of maintaining manageable structures. Village pastor in the best sense of the word. When the EKD, under the leadership of the then council chairman Wolfgang Huber, wanted to prescribe a modernization course for the supposedly sleepy German Protestants, the alarm bells rang at Weskott.

Like a gradually growing group of like-minded people between Flensburg and Lake Constance, he disliked the new line given by the EKD headquarters in Hanover. For a lot of money, consulting companies were hired that, 500 years after Luther, viewed the church as a kind of corporation and wanted to combat the decline in membership and secularization with purely business management methods.

In an “impulse paper” called “Church of Freedom”, the talk was of core business and markets, of competition with other providers and of quality management. Very soon the bad word was circulating about the “McKinsey Church”. A counter-movement called “Leave the Church in the Village” formed. The model sounded simple, but it developed a lot of explosive power. And Martin Weskott quickly became one of his eloquent supporters.

What the critics of the “suit wearers” from Hanover wanted to impose on the church with their obsession with regulation, their penchant for standardization and their “customer loyalty instruments” had long displeased him. He stubbornly advocated the continuation of his own diakonia, which should be “plowed under” a network of social stations, against all kinds of resistance and contrary to the general trend.

“The community nurse is not a model from the day before yesterday, but more indispensable today than ever,” was Weskott’s credo. So it is not surprising that the 1200 parishioners in Katlenburg and the neighboring towns of Suterode and Wachenhausen did not like to let their pastor go when his retirement was unstoppable.

They will be happy if Weskott continues to check his book barn on Sundays after the service. And provides replenishment – as recently again with treasures from the holdings of the Brecht biographer and theater critic Ernst Schumacher.

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