This article originally appeared on VICE Germany
It’s 9AM, when I see a student walk into the already packed reading room on the top floor of the main library at the University of Leipzig, in eastern Germany. Somehow, she manages to find a free desk. She lays her books and notepad down on the table and leaves again, in a sneaky attempt to save the spot for later. The act goes directly against library etiquette. Other students prowl down the aisles like wolves desperately hunting for a bit of space to study. Occasionally, someone thinks they’ve found a spot where nobody’s sat – only to find the girls’ stuff occupying it.
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About 30 minutes later, a librarian wearing a pair of frameless glasses enters the room. “Do you know who’s sitting here?” he whispers to a young man, gesturing towards the books and notepad. He shakes his head, and within seconds, the girl’s stuff is cleared away. Less than a minute later, another student has taken up the spot.
There are a lot of battles being fought in a university library each morning – people are fighting each other for a spot to study, but also their own individual battles against sleep, stress, their workload and procrastination. As the lights from MacBooks throw a blue tinted shine onto hundreds of sleep-deprived faces, I notice that everyone deals with the pressure differently. One student looks completely enthralled scrolling down her Facebook timeline, while another is writing notecard upon notecard.
Students at the University of Leipzig have an advantage over those at many other universities in Germany, because they have a library that’s open 24 hours a day. It’s an all-you-can-learn space, so to speak. Besides that, it’s just like any other library – thousands of books on every topic fill three levels of the building, which contains 550 workspaces and a few pleather sofas. The carpets are grey, the walls are wood-panelled. I’m told that even on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, you’ll still find around 50 students working here. My plan is to spend a full 24 hours here in the midst of exam season – the library’s busiest period – to see how the students cope with the stress.
One of the first questions that spring to mind as I look around the space, is why all these people choose the dull carpets and the uncertainty of finding a desk over the comfort of their homes, where they don’t even have to wear trousers. I decide to ask a 21-year-old veterinary student: “My house has too many distractions,” she replies. “Mostly in the form of the internet and my fridge. In the library, everyone around you is hard at work, there’s a sense of collective concentration. When you’re alone, your mind can drift away and suddenly you’ll find yourself knee-deep in your Facebook timeline or hours in a YouTube binge. You’ll feel some shame, but not enough to really snap out of it. That’s different when someone next to you is earnestly trying to make sense of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity.”
At some point in the early afternoon, I spot one student guiding an invisible spoon up to her mouth and pretending to chew. She’s gesturing to a friend sat a few tables away, who in turn signal she’s ready for lunch. Slowly more and more people are leaving their desks and heading to the canteen, where they can choose between potato dumplings with mushrooms for €2.45 or hot dog pizza for €1.50. It’s loud and cheery in the cafeteria – people are clearly happy to be away from their books and laptop. More noise breaks out as someone spills a tray with sausages over a table.
In the afternoon, the collective concentration seems to have been replaced with another physical state that also seems to be shared – the food coma. Students lean back, yawn, stare emptily into space. Someone walking past your chair is for many enough of a distraction.
But the lack of concentration allows room for a bit of fun, and mostly flirting. I see eyes darting around the room looking for someone to catch their eye. If eye contact lasts a little bit longer than expected, it’s a match. Tinder for the bored. In fact, I find out that there is a second library in the campus, called Albertina, which includes a reading area known among students as “The Lonely Hearts Room” – apparently its common knowledge that anyone hanging out there is single and on the lookout for a date.
As the late afternoon turns into evening, I get the feeling that people are looking for ways to procrastinate. It’s harder to do that without a phone – which students are asked to leave in their lockers before entering the study areas. Outside, sitting on the library steps, a 20-year-old student is eager to share some gossip with me. She tells me about the time a fight broke out between two guys over a seat, which led to the staff having to call an ambulance. “There’s even a rumour,” she continues, “that a girl actually lived here at one point, studying day and night.”
The night-shift starts at 10PM, when the main entrance closes and students have to show their I.D. to be allowed in through a special door and past a couple of night guards. By 11PM most of the library is empty. The remaining students form a community of the truly dedicated and the incredibly desperate. One of the guards sits at a computer by the entrance. From his headphones, “You Win Again” by the Bee Gees is ringing out – he’s watching the music video on YouTube.
By 1AM, I see about two-dozen students still sat at their tables, working under the light of their desk lamps. In the copier room on the first floor, a guy is standing barefoot by the scanner.
I veer outside hoping for a bit of excitements, where I find two guys in their mid-twenties, who ask that I refer to them as “Ma-Yu” and “Jau-Cfu” for some reason. They are sharing a joint with a female student – she showed no interest in making up a name for herself. “I’ve got an exam tomorrow,” says Jau-Cfu, who plans on working through the night. He’s not sure what time, exactly. “I think it’s in the afternoon,” he says. He’s also taken some speed, thinking that might help him stay away. “Once on an all-nighter, I fell asleep under a table and was woken up by a Ghostbuster,” he goes on. By “Ghostbuster”, he means one of the library cleaners, who wear their vacuums on their back.
His friend, Ma-Yu, has apparently decided to hang out in the library just for fun. “I had my last and only exam yesterday. Otherwise I would just be at home watching The Royals,” he explains.. At the moment, Ma-Yu is reading Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. “It makes me think: What would happen if humanity forgot its history?” he exclaims – likely not just inspired by the book, but also by the drugs he’s consumed. “Just imagine: What if we got to keep all the discoveries but the consequences of all world events had been forgotten?”
At 3AM, the group is back outside, this time smoking cigarettes. “I work in a sex shop with a sex cinema,” says Jau-Cfu though I didn’t ask. “At Christmas, people come and buy butt-plugs in the shape of a Christmas tree, complete with a star on top.”
By 4AM, the library is deadly quiet. Another girl I met on the steps earlier, informed that “in the early hours, people come in here to fuck,” but I’m yet to encounter any couples getting it on. I ask the cleaners about this and they confirm that they do catch people having sex quite often. But I find no such excitement this evening. I hear no moaning – just the wheezing of the ventilation system.
Seven people remain in the library, until the morning – including Jau-Cfu and Ma-Yu and two mathematics students, who are non-stop scribbling down formulas in their notepads. It’s all quiet until 7AM, when the early risers begin to stumble in. One student heads straight to one of the red sofas to take a nap. “This couch is more comfortable than my bed,” he says. By 9AM, the battle over the library is once again in full swing.
