In a world bent on destruction, preservationists have fought to save everything from
the wilderness and natural resources to linguistic and cultural heritages.
Artistically, the “early music” movement for historically informed performance of works from
the Medieval, Rennaisance and Baroque periods is probably the best-known example of the
preservationist ethic. It also has a counterpart in the theater: The British troupe Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre,
London, which is about to launch a 5-city, U.S. tour of
“Twelfth Night (or What You Will),” explores “original practices” from the early 1600s: an
all-male, cross-dressing cast, handmade Elizabethan clothes, music performed on period
instruments, and faithful recreations of Elizabethan props.
But no organization, perhaps not even the World
Wildlife Fund, is as devoted to preservation as UNESCO’s
Memory of the World Programme. Its stated
intention — “to guard against collective amnesia” — has to be the hippest official mandate of any
world body. By seeking out and registering archival holdings of historic documents and library
collections, the program (and the broader idea of documentary heritage itself) “is the mirror
of the world and its memory.”
So what kind of stuff has made it into the Memory of the World Register?
Stuff like this:
The original manuscript of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; 1,300 works on astronomy (in
Turkish, Persian and Arabic) held in the Library of Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research
Institute at Bogazici University in Istanbul; an inventory of postcards from Africa covering the
years 1890-1930; archives of the Warsaw Ghetto; a Uzbekistan collection of Oriental miniatures
of the Middle East from the 14th to 17th centuries; a Colombian exhibition of “100
years of photography”; Copernicus’ autobiography “De revolutionibus libri sex,” from 1520 or
so.
Here are some previously nominated items from China, from Finland, and from the United States.
As of this month, UNESCO is planning to add 23 more documentary collections from 20
countries, among them:
From France:
The original Declaration of the Rights of Man and
of the Citizen of 1789-1791. It’s preserved at National Historical Archives Center in Paris. There
are actually six versions. The one included in the Register is the first, dated Nov. 3, 1789,
along with a signed note and letters patent by King Louis XVI approving the text of the
Declaration and various decrees adopted by the National Assembly between August and
November of that year.
From Barbados: The Documentary Heritage of Enslaved Peoples
of the Caribbean. This is a unique body of evidence, including legal documents, plantation ledgers,
estate and shipping inventories, rare books, original prints and paintings, relating to the lives of
enslaved Caribbean people through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, preserved by the Barbados
Museum & Historical Society.
From Chile: The Human Rights Archive of Chile. Originating from
several collections, it includes material from human rights organizations active during the military
dictatorship (1973 to 1989), notably press clippings about human rights abuses from 1974 to
1990, (arrests, political executions, banishments, torture and disappearances), and an important
photo register of nearly 1,000 of the people who disappeared during the dictatorship.
From Germany: Illuminated manuscripts from the Ottonian period
produced in the monastery of Reichenau (Lake Constance) for Emperor Otto III (983-1002) and
for his successor Heinrich II (1002-1024). This dispersed set of 10 manuscripts, which
survived the upheavals of an entire millennium, epitomizes book illustration of the Ottonian period
in Germany.
From Luxembourg: The “Family of Man” photographic exhibition
mounted by the photographer Edward J. Steichen in 1955 for the New York Museum of Modern
Art (MoMA). It was donated by the U.S. government to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and is
preserved in the Clervaux Museum.
From Mexico: The original cellulose nitrate negative of the 1950
film “Los olvidados,” released in English as “The Young and the Damned,” directed by
Spanish-Mexican director Luis Bunuel. It had been lost for 20 years and is now preserved in
Mexico City, in the vaults of Filmoteca of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
From the Netherlands: The archives of the Dutch East India
Company. Founded in 1602, the Dutch East India Company was the largest of the early modern
European trading companies operating in Asia. Between 1602 and 1796, the company sent almost
a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more
than 2.5 million tons of Asian trade goods. The archive has 25 million pages of records about
political, economic, cultural, religious and social circumstances produced by company officials
who were stationed in outposts on the trade routes.
From Poland: The 21 Demands, which documents the birth of the
Solidarity trade union. These political demands, made by the Strike Committee in August 1980, in
Gdansk, led to the creation of Solidarity — the first free trade union within the Communist
bloc — and marked a watershed in the history of the Communist bloc.
There’s also a separate World Heritage List. Isn’t it
nice to know the United States has resumed paying its fair share of contributions to
UNESCO?
