Scribblings with Green Chalk

As in: A place one should not go to if one wishes to obtain books. No chance. The downfall of European education is imminent and the root of evil is planted in university libraries. The falcon cannot hear the falconer and the works.

When I was doing my undergrad in the land of milk and honey, I knew that the books either simply weren’t there because the money which the government could have spent on education was channeled into subsidies for farmers, or because the department head had snatched them for his private collection years ago. What puzzles me about German-speaking countries is that when the books actually are there, they tend to be inaccessible to human beings.

Most of the books you will ever need as a student in Europe fall under the category of departmental holdings. ‘Departmental holding’ in library-catalog-speak means that whatever you were looking for is out of bounds. The only person who gets to touch it is the librarian and, if the librarian is in a good mood, the tenured professor. Younger faculty probably need to go through some sort of bloody initiation rites. In short, the departmental library is the possessive librarian’s dream come true. After another hard day of guarding the fount of knowledge from the dirty paws of the unworthy masses, they can freely exclaim “mine, all mine!” and I imagine many of them do. You, as a mere mortal, are allowed to go crying to your mommy.

You might be somewhat comforted to hear that departmental holdings may be looked at briefly in reading rooms. Yet the reading room is a subject of its own.

“It is not accidental that in the torturers’ idiom the room in which the brutality occurs was called the ‘production room’ in the Philippines, the ‘cinema room’ in South Vietnam, and the ‘blue lit stage’ in Chile: built on these repeated acts of display and having as its purpose the production of a fantastic illusion of power, torture is a grotesque piece of compensatory drama,” writes Elaine Scarry. In Europe, we call it the reading room, the public space of discomfort and impossible work conditions in which the student is invited to read and write. Welcome to the reading room.

First, you are made to strip down almost your underwear, because if your sweater is judged too fluffy by the librarian, you will be accused of introducing harmful paper-destroying dampness into the open stacks area. No bags are allowed. If you say you don’t understand why, it just means you’re a thief trying to sneak out a stack of precious first editions in your tiny pocketbook. It doesn’t matter that all books have magnetic strips and that there are alarm gates at the exit. Come in (almost) naked and innocent or leave this holy place forever.

Once you’ve stuffed all your belongings into a locker two floors away (if you were smart enough to bring small change), you can make your way to the reading room. (Turning back at some point to get the library card which you left in the locker.) The library does not take any responsibility for your belongings but you’re fine with that, since you have realized by now that you mean nothing to this glorious institution. Apart from being the source of occasional entertainment for the staff: the sight of you balancing your laptop, notebook, wallet, and pens and trying not to drop any of those while you look for the library card can be mildly hilarious. Especially if you do drop them.

More or less settled in the reading room, you are made acutely aware of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You want at the same time to get the pencil you left in the locker, to drink, and to go to the bathroom. (Did you notice that big sign at the entrance, the one with the water bottle crossed out?) Concentration is impossible, it doesn’t matter that you are allowed to work with the desired book for maybe even a whole hour before the library closes. You can’t focus. Chances are that you will not want to add to the time you’ve already wasted there and will decide not to eat for a month so as to be able to afford a copy of the book. If you can still remember what it was.

In the rare fortunate situation, the book you need is in the main library, in the open stacks, where you can pick it up yourself and take home. Yet the open stacks area or, more accurately, Freihandbereich is not always the idyll it promises to be. With no way to reserve the volume you want from home, you have to run to the shelf (stripped, remember) and pray that no one is using the book in the building at that very moment. What if that nightmare scenario is true? What then?

Well, in that case, not even an eyelid-deforming disease will melt the icecaps on the librarian’s heart. All you can do is come back every day like a romantic idiot and check if the book is on the shelf. Of course you have all the time in the world. After all, it’s Europe and we’re all brimming with sophistication to the point where we don’t mind the blatant ludicrousness of such actions but repeat them with pleasure.

If you were wondering why I did the bulk of my library research in Florida, now you know.