Kamenz-Lessing library: A living room for the city

Wolfgang Melzer can be reached in a library of old school. The chairman of the association for the Kamenz city library is 500 kilometers west in Detmold. In the Lippische State Library, he researches the playwright Christian Dietrich Grabbe, whom he wants to devote a story. The reading rooms work scientifically; Silence is the top user obligation. Melzer apologizes, so he has to go outside to make calls.

In the library of his hometown Kamenz, which is named with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing after a other poet born here and whose well -being he takes care of the two dozen members of the support association, he would not have to. There is no room here in which silence is the top priority. Melzer could make it comfortable on a sofa in the foyer, for example. He would only have to accept that the calls of young people can be heard in the background who play in a separee on the game console. The club boss could also make calls in a area with tables and chairs, in which, of course, students may talk about a lecture or practice it on a digital board. On this day shortly before the holidays, nobody spoke here. A high school student on a piano “all my ducklings”.

In earlier times he would have caught the complaint of a librarian. Marion Kutter, the head of the Kamenz library, is pleased that the instrument is used. “Importance is a big plus of our house,” she says. By side should not be scratched in your library, but discussions are not undesirable. If this is bothered by reading, you can withdraw in reading islands that offer more seclusion. Compared their facility with a house, it did not correspond to the study room, says Kutter: “Our library should be the city’s living room.”

Libraries have changed a lot. When the Kamenzer namesake Lessing became a librarian in Wolfenbüttel in May 1770, these were often elitist facilities that were like a after -esses of science as well as certificates of the prosperity of their noble founders. The Kamenz library was originally reserved for the students of a lyceum. Later she opened the wider city population. But the purpose was narrowly outlined here: libraries collected books that were able to use interested parties for a certain time. The chapter is over, says Kutter: “The time as a pure lending is over for public libraries.”

Where the journey is going, this has just been discussed at the German Library Congress, which ends in Bremen this Friday. Around 3000 experts advise what role their institutions play in democratic society and where their self -image develops. Libraries have increasingly become public places where people are standing and exchanging without having to read; where you can use workshops with 3D printers or sound studios; on which drilling machines can also be borrowed in addition to books. In pioneering houses such as the Helsinki Oodi Central Library, books can only be seen at second glance or not at all.

But you don’t have to travel to Helsinki to experience what a modern library can look like. Marion Kutter looked at libraries in Dresden and Potsdam on vacation, in Zwickau and Freiberg. Ideas that inspired her collected them. At that time, her own library was still in the birthplace of Lessing: part of a museum for the poet, the children’s department in the former carbon cellar underneath, without a window. “It was not a nice condition,” says Kutter. Legals were difficult to organize, and 350 square meters of usable space were much too small.

Then the district of Bautzen built an extension for the high school in Kamenz. At the request of the city, it was increased around one floor. The library also found its new domicile in this – on 900 square meters. With the involvement of ideas that cutter collected on vacation, the Kamenz office PDW architects developed a city library that could now inspire colleagues and was awarded the Saxon Library Prize 2023 shortly after the opening. She shows “exemplary how professional library work and innovative strength led to an inviting residence, event and cultural location in Kamenz,” praised Saxony’s Minister of Culture Barbara Klepsch.

The foyer is already inviting, where there is no books to be seen – except in an installation that advertises with a deck chair and air mattress for a summer reading competition for schoolchildren. Instead of books, there is armchairs and a coffee machine. “This ensures quality of stay,” says Kutter, “and also a few income.”

On the right, the view of the area for children opens up to the right with the basement of once in common. There are large windows and a light installation on the ceiling in the form of a sun. The shelves are hip high: “The very small ones come.” Orientation offers a mascot with three eyes, the “reading monster”. Accessories like a pacifier or a crown indicate the target group or the genre of the books.

The youngest was also considered when designing the loan. This is also possible at terminals where the readers can pull their books over a scanner and “book” themselves. The desks can be adjusted in height at the push of a button: “So three -year -olds can borrow their pixies themselves.” The terminals give users more independence. The boss enables the technology to better deal with the limited resources of a small town library. It has four “full -time equivalents” in which four librarians and the caretaker share. They keep the house open on five days of the week from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., work up to 5000 new books and other media a year, sort out just as many use and organize over 150 events a year. The activity has changed a lot since her training, says Kutter: “It still happens that we give tips for good crime novels, but that’s the smallest part.”

At times it is not available for reading tips anyway. Together with a modern access system, the terminals also allow the library to be opened at times when no staff is present: on weekdays between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., Saturday and Sunday from nine to nine. In the city council there was initially skepticism whether this principle of an “open library” works. After two years, Kutter can calm down the local politicians: “There is no damage.” Instead, the new opening hours contribute to the fact that the number of users has increased to 120,000 a year – in a city with 17,000 inhabitants. Half of the visitors, Kutter emphasizes, is younger than 30 years.

Such numbers show that reading books is not a dying phenomenon. “We can keep young people reading,” says Wolfgang Melzer, the head of the association. Sometimes he is amazed at what the youth reads. Books by Erwin Strittmatter, whom he and his club colleagues appreciate high, disappear from the shelves because they are no longer borrowed, unlike current bestsellers, whose literary value Melzer sometimes does not really open up. He wanted to invite an author “so that she explains to us what the secret of such books is,” he says. This should be interested in Kamenz as well as the discussion rounds under the title “Words and Weißwein”, to which the association invites scientists twice a year, each interested in 70 to 100.

Melzer and cutter will be convinced that libraries will continue to play an important role in the future. In addition, there are now more to rental in Kamenz than just books, films and CDs. A “library of things” offers a projector with a canvas or a karaoke system. “Sharing resources is the DNA of libraries,” says Kutter, who, of course, always wants a reference to “Literature, Language or Generation of Knowledge”: “I would not add cargo bikes to the range.” There are learning computers and robots for children.

A robot is also the only unfulfilled wish on your list of ideas for a modern library. Such devices could now advise readers and lead to the location of a book to the shelves, says Kutter. At some point, she hopes, the money is enough for such a “employee” in the Kamenz Lessing Library, which is everything else than a library of old school.