After eight years the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar has completed its coope- rative partnership in the German-Swiss cul- tural project »Pro Helvetica in Weimar«. Over the course of the project 1,329 of the books which had been damaged by fire and cont- ained relevance to Switzerland were repaired in Swiss workshops. At the closing celebration ceremony in Zurich on October 23, 2015, Horst Köhler, the former German President, said, among other things:
»I wonder whether the transiency of the virtual world, its fluidity, isn‘ t also undercutting our reading habits and rea- ding abilities. Indeed, these habits have been changing for centuries, and we have come a long way from the intensive, repe- titive, reading aloud of the family Bible, which was once the sole book in a home and the singular source of truth, to to- day‘s one-time, casual, silent, just-for- fun reading of the latest fashionable no- vel, with a quick skip through all the pas- sages of descriptive scenery. And yet, it seems to me, there is a considerable shift in the perception and impact of the writ- ten word, when it can be simply turned on and off alongside windows for the weather map or the Saturday night thriller. There is a loss of permanence, of presence, of the constancy of a book when I put it down. It becomes just one more transient guest among the many kinds of content and services in our era of distraction and mul- ti-tasking.
Perhaps this sounds rather overly-pessimistic; that was not my intention. Yet I feel it is very important that, despite all our enthusiasm for technological progress, we don‘t hand over control of the good books entirely, for we need them not only for sustainment but also for their fi- ber.