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When the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne slid 20 meters into the ground in March 2009, two people died and the memory of a city was swallowed by the earth. The largest collection of medieval writings, priceless works on paper, and entire archives sank into the ground with it. In the groundwater, they merged together into an agglomeration of paper, cement, silicon, sentence fragments,and strings. The reasons for this catastrophe were corruption and mismanagement. Theft and deceit, too. Lastly, complex human error. It is believed to have been a network of cronyism. In other words, …