Cologne, Germany - A novelist's papers, including the scroll awarding him the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature, have been recovered from a pile of rubble in the German city of Cologne, officials said Thursday.

Manuscripts and letters by Heinrich Boell, who died in 1985, had been placed in the city archives for safekeeping. But the building collapsed, killing two people, on March 3, apparently after a pothole had formed in a construction site under the street outside.

Bettina Schmidt-Czaia, the city archivist, said the Boell papers were found in a crushed carton and were "fairly unharmed."

The collapse of the building, which contained 30,000 metres of shelving, was at first thought to have wiped out 1,000 years of records and made it impossible to know the city's history again.

"The city's memory has not been wiped out. That's just a misconception," said Schmidt-Czaia.

The archivist said 13,000 metres of papers had been recovered from the rubble so far and 4,000 metres had been in a part of the building that remained intact.

Independent engineers from the TUV Rheinland company issued a report Thursday saying some other buildings had suffered cracks from the excavations for an underground train line, but none of the 276 buildings was in danger of collapse. (dpa)