Paul, the men on the campus of the Goethe University in Frankfurt's Bockenheim district are certain, will not come today.

He no longer opens his book stand, which has been in the passage between Bockenheimer Warte and the campus area for ages, on this Monday lunchtime.

“He has to cope with it first,” says one of the men and looks at the charred books, the remains of the banana boxes, the broken DVDs, the chaos, all the rubbish.

"To see something like this here, it hurts, I'm really fed up with it today," he snorts.

Does he know how to contact the antiquarian whose warehouse has now been destroyed?

“No,” says the man.

"You can't reach Paul, he doesn't have a cell phone."

Alexander Juergs

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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There was a fire on campus on Saturday evening. The flames stood ten meters high between the lab room, the old university cafeteria, which had been vacant for a long time, and the Juridicum, the concrete block on the Senckenberg facility. The fire department says 20 tons of books have been destroyed. It probably wasn't quite that much after all, say the men. The pungent smell of fire is still intense, even on the second day after the fire. The police believe that an arsonist was responsible.

It is not the first time that books, records, CDs, DVDs and other odds and ends that the man, whom everyone here calls only by first name, wanted to sell, have fallen victim to the flames.

There had already been a fire on the Bockenheim university campus in mid-March.

At that time it hit a warehouse that the man had set up in front of the entrance to the university campus.

The books that the dealer sells have been outside overnight for many years, packed in moving boxes or banana boxes, protected by plastic sheeting.

Nothing has ever happened in all that time, but now there have been two fires in a row.

Pyromaniac or maddened acquaintance?

Many believe that this cannot be a coincidence.

So was it a pyromaniac, someone who delights in the fires he starts himself, who set the bookseller's warehouse on fire?

“That could be,” says Norbert Heinz, who came to campus to look at the scene of the fire.

Heinz is also an antiquarian.

He has his business on the Zeil, it is quite far at the beginning, where the shopping street is not yet a pedestrian zone.

He has known Paul, the bookseller, since the mid-1980s, says Heinz.

At that time he also sold his books on the Bockenheim campus.

"Paul is an incredibly kind-hearted and helpful person," says Heinz.

He would have been helping people who are dirty, homeless, drug addicts and alcoholics for a long time, giving them a little money, supporting them wherever possible.

"Paul helps where he can."

But some, says Heinz, also take advantage of such helpfulness, reacting annoyed and angry when they think someone else is preferred or better cared for.

He can therefore also imagine that it was not a pyromaniac who set the two fires on the camps, but someone from the man's circle of friends.

"But that," says Heinz, "is all just speculation."

Prevent the next fire

When a bookseller's warehouse burned down for the first time in March, the man was supported by many people from the district. Calls to help the dealer from the university campus spread via social media. People came by and donated their old books. “That was really enormous,” Heinz remembers.

But will that also work a second time? Can Paul, the bookseller, count on solidarity again? Peter Weber hopes very much. “What kind of sick people are they who do something like that?” Asks the man who works at KfW Bank across from the university campus while looking at the charred remains of the book store. “The book stand is part of the district, it's an institution,” says Weber. He always liked to stop by there, rummage a bit in the book boxes, and chat with the bookseller. "The man is a luminary in the neighborhood." Weber has a suggestion on how it might be possible to prevent it from burning a third time as it did on a Saturday night: "One would have to buy the man a container in which he can safely store his books."