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TRANSFORMING ARCHIVES
Aleida Assmann
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There are many intermediate stages between remembering and forgetting. I will examine some of them more closely. In doing so, I will also focus on language and metaphors and point to examples from artwork and installations to illustrate my thoughts.
Unlike inside libraries and archives, the museum is a frame in which different degrees of intensity of remembering and forgetting are staged in spatial arrangement. To make this more evident, the model of a department store can be used to consider the sequence of connected and interconnecting rooms of the museum space. Facing out onto the street are the display windows, which are designed to attract the attention of shoppers, holding stimulating offers and an aesthetic arrangement of the products on sale inside the store. People will normally pass the window display providing an “inside look” before entering the store. In the salesroom, customers will then find the showcased items from the window displays, well sorted and presented, to inspect and probe, before buying them. Beyond this, there is a third space that is not in public view: This is the warehouse, where the merchandise is stacked on shelves, invisible to the customers, but waiting to be called forth.
The three-tiered spatial sequence of display window, salesroom, and warehouse (“Magazin”) can easily be applied to the museum space too. Here, there is also a display window; these are the special exhibitions, which are carefully presented and subject to rapid change. These temporary exhibits often get moved from place to place in order that as many viewers as possible get to see them. As a fleeting opportunity, these exhibits often receive the greatest attention and the strongest media response. Behind them, analogous to the salesroom, are the regular museum exhibition spaces, which make accessible the permanent collection. Here, one can reliably encounter the most prized works of art history again and again, in a long-term, if not permanent arrangement. The canonised paintings and objects, which are presented to visitors over many decades, provide opportunities to revisit them again and again and from generation to generation. Many visitors enter the museum space with the most popular images of the Western art canon in their minds, because they have already seen them countless times in reproductions in books and magazines, on calendars and postcards. They are engrained in the bourgeois memory through education and different media. Visiting museums, therefore, is inspired not only by curiosity, the chance of new discoveries, but also by a desire to re-encounter old favourites. With each re-encounter, the impression deepens and enriches the imprint of the images on the memory. It is in this renewed exchange with canonical images and classical works of art that cultural education and aesthetic understanding unfold.
Spaces purely used to store things, on the other hand, like the cellar or the attic, are much less accessible, rarely visited, and generally hidden from view. The Italian photographer Mauro Fiorese has made a series of photographs in the storage facilities of some of Italy’s great museums. In a series called “Treasure rooms”, he focuses only on what is in storage, hidden-fromview, that which thus exists on the reverse of the public’s attention – well preserved, but spatially excluded, locked away, invisible, and forgotten. So far, when it comes to the metaphor of memory, attention has been focused in spatial images, such as the two-dimensional writing board or the three-dimensional magazine. These spatial-image donors must, however, be supplemented by the fourth dimension if one is to grasp the temporal dynamics of remembering and forgetting in their complexity, because remembering is not the same as storing. A central source of imagery for the temporal dynamics of remembering and forgetting is the complex of death and rebirth or revival, which played a major role in the conceptual self-image of the Renaissance. While the humanists of the early modern period prided themselves in their conscious retrieval and restoration of bringing back to life a dead culture, thanks to their huge efforts in education and learning, the early 20th-century scholar Aby Warburg reinterpreted this epochal concept and metaphor of the Renaissance in terms of an unconscious return of the repressed.
Another popular-image provider for remembering and forgetting is the biorhythm of sleeping and awakening. T. S. Eliot found impressive words for this rhythm in his verse drama The Rock:
“We are children quickly tired: children who are up in the night and fall asleep as the rocket is fired; and the day is long for work or play. / We tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep and are glad to sleep, / Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night and the seasons. / And we must extinguish the candle, put out the light and relight it; / Forever must quench, forever relight the flame.”1
In the myth of gnosis in late antiquity, sleeping and awakening are associated with forgetting and remembering a former authentic state of existence. We can find the motif of sleeping and waking as a signal of deep transformation in fairy tales such as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, where life is suddenly arrested and falls back into an unconscious state of sleep for a long period of time. This metaphor is used in everyday journalism: An article on German colonial history is titled “A Gap in our Memory”, another, “Dornröschen-Schlaf beendet” (Sleeping Beauty has Awoken).
A particularly sensory image for temporary forgetting is freezing and thawing. Ruth Klüger, for example, when writing down memories of her experiences in concentration camps and death camps, came up against a sudden barrier in her memory after fifty years. She could no longer remember the false name that she and her mother had adopted while fleeing shortly before the end of the Second World War. She picked up the phone and called her then 87-year-old mother. The mother:
“[A]fter a short hesitation, calls up the stored name on the screen of her memory: ‘Kalisch was our name on the wrong papers.’ At first, the name means nothing to me. Kalisch. It’s like food you take out of the freezer, odourless and tasteless. Then, when it thaws, a slight aroma emanates from it. From far away I taste it, chewing on it. Because it was frozen and is
What is happening in these examples of a rhythmic dynamic is compressed and expressed in the small prefix “re-”. It does not only appear in the word Re-naissance, but also plays a leading role in all the various expressions for remembering: re-member, re-mind, re-collection, recordare, up to the “re-turn of the re-pressed”. Something is always re-trieved or comes back of its own accord, which does not necessarily have to be the same as the initial stimulus. With this movement of a re-turn, re-petition, or re-storation the dimension of time comes into play, extending and filling in the distance for the intervals between remembering, forgetting, and re-membering. To be certain of remembering something, it must have temporarily disappeared from the screen of our consciousness. Remembering always takes place over temporal intervals of not remembering or even forgetting. Spatial metaphors of memory, be they two-dimensional like the slate or three-dimensional like the warehouse, are therefore insufficient. Remembering gains weight and meaning only with this effort at overcoming a temporal distance and a phase of absence: a contingent trigger or a conscious effort brings something back into the present or engages with something that temporarily, or for a long time had not been the object of attention, knowledge, or active consciousness. Friedrich Georg Jünger, therefore, distinguished between two forms of forgetting, one that involves loss – when there is nothing to retrieve any more – and one that involves preservation and, therefore, includes the possibility of retrieval: “The forgetting that makes possible the preservation of what has been thought and its return to thought” is what he calls preservative forgetting. 3 Preservation presupposes a place where something is safely stored. Consequently, to be able to do justice to phenomena such as deferral or latency, we must merge the spatial-memory images with the temporal ones. Latency, after all, comes from the Latin verb latere, to conceal, to hide; there must be a place where something temporarily removed from consciousness can hide and endure.
STABILISING FORMS OF DURATION AND REPETITION
Remembering and forgetting have expiration dates, which are controlled by the frames and rhythms of memory that organise our consciousness. These rhythms are biologically, physiologically, and anthropologically based and are culturally shaped. In remembering and forgetting, then, it is imperative to consider the interplay of the two dimensions of space and time. There are “stabilising forms of duration” and “stabilising forms of repetition”. Memory needs both: what is stored exclusively materially and is not reactivated again will be forgotten, despite its lasting presence. This is true for monuments as well as for books. Without repetition, re-reading, and periodic renewal, for example on anniversaries, no memory will be formed. Cultural memory, like individual memory, is therefore dependent on external impulses or “triggers”. What is permanently stored in museums, archives, and libraries must be triggered from time to time on certain occasions, that is, initiated, performed, staged, and reactivated. Anniversaries and jubilees are scheduled dates that serve several functions: They create occasions for a re-encounter with one’s own history, which is critically reviewed, renewed, updated, and synchronised in the present on these occasions. On historical anniversaries, a society assures itself of the central key events and turning points as lasting and normative reference dates of its history. These dates form a framework for collective self-staging, they offer occasions for personal participation in events, and stimulate debates and reflections, which update and critically renew the historical consciousness and position of a society.
Forgetting, therefore, can occur as a direct consequence if the spatial and temporal dimensions of remembering are radically separated. Where a message is written in stone and given a monumental form intended to connect with an indefinite future, but no provision is made for the refreshment and renewal of that message, the monument invariably turns into a symbol of forgetting. Robert Musil famously noted a paradox here: that monuments are designed to attract attention and become unforgettable, but, due to their massive immobility and solid permanence, people automatically ignore them and they become quickly invisible. The Rider monument on the square in front of the main railway station in Hanover, for example, has the inscription: “To the patron of the country, his loyal people”. Those who pass by it are no longer these loyal people and hardly know which Landesvater was hoisted onto a horse here. Although the monument is highly visible in public space, its commemorative appeal is extinguished. The monument has changed into an object of folklore. But that does not mean that it has become superfluous. People who want to see each other agree to meet “under the tail”.
FORMS AND TECHNIQUES OF FORGETTING
There are material and mental forms and techniques of forgetting, and among them some that are actively and consciously deployed, and some that are passively experienced and work unconsciously. Let us take a closer look at four of these: Losing, destroying, repressing, and silence.
Losing: Christian Boltanski brought the meaning of this word back to general consciousness in an exhibition staged at the Haus der Kunst in 1997. It was called “Lost in Munich” and presented objects that the artist had received from the lost-and-found office in that city. To this day, it is the only art exhibition in which owners could pick up their lost items. At the same time, the exhibited objects were perceived quite differently in the new setting. Boltanski no longer worked with the formal aesthetic logic of the object trouvé, but within the very different framework of the search for traces. For Boltanski, every object has a history, and is soaked with the human imprint of an individual story for which he is always searching and pointing to, even if there is no possibility to retrieve or
Mauro Fiorese, Treasure Rooms of the Ca’ Pesaro – Venice, pigment print on cotton paper, 2015
reconstruct it. For Boltanski, the used object is a mute witness of a unique human life.4 In this way, he uses art to make the absence present. The object is thereby transformed from a commodity into a memento and, when these memories are lost, which happens inexorably, into the last witness of a life lived or a childhood lost. Very much like photographs, the clothes from the lost-and-found office are indexical signs. They retain a trace of the direct contact which they once had with the absent person to whom they once belonged.5 Things are full of stories, and since we no longer know them, Boltanski is the one to remind us that this knowledge is lost. Destroying can take different forms. One of these is through deliberate violence. Examples are the acts of vandalism and iconoclasm that have accompanied the history of religious struggles in Europe. Over the centuries, images, sculptures, and sacred objects have fallen victim to blasphemic or zealotic destruction. Today, we witness the ostentatious destruction of ancient ruins such as the oasis city of Palmyra by the Islamic State. But in a different mode, modern art also retains an iconoclastic trait when ornamental facades of historic buildings are erased to please the purism of modern architects. Abstract art is yet another case; it forbids itself the figurative richness of tradition, while atonal music abolished the rulebook of harmony.
Destruction, however, is not only caused by violence and intolerance, nor only to serve the emergence of new art forms. Catastrophes such as the fire of the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar in 2004 also destroyed cultural assets, as did the forest fire in California in 2018, which caused the manuscript of Rilke’s poem “The Panther” to go up in flames in Thomas Gottschalk’s holiday home. Due to uncontrolled underground construction work, the City Archive in Cologne collapsed in 2009. Tons of archival sources were buried in the mud of the abyss. From 2011 onwards, reports were published listing recovered items that were carefully restored piece by piece. In a small-scale example, the little triumphs of recovery amidst the chaos of destruction were another amazing example of
Mauro Fiorese, Treasure Rooms of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna – Rome, pigment print on cotton paper, 2014
what the syllable “re-” can stand for: Thanks to the impressive technical apparatus of cleaning, restoration, and documentation, the former owners were sent lists of the found and assigned archival documents.6
The word repression encompasses a whole bundle of deliberate acts of forgetting, which Stanley Cohen has described as “states of denial”.7 They include covering up, concealing, silencing, dropping, bracketing, passing over, recoding, overwriting, ignoring, neutralising, whitewashing, trivialising, and normalising. How these actions came to pass within the framework of collective silence in post-war West Germany can be shown by a concrete example, the story of the synagogue in the small town of Haigerloch in the Eyachtal in Baden Württemberg. This town presents itself on its homepage as a “little lilac town, rock town, baroque gem” and “cradle of atomic research” (due to Werner Heisenberg, the physicist, setting up his research space there after the war).8 Cleared out, but not destroyed, the synagogue remained as a strange relict of the Nazi past after 1945. Since there was no longer a Jewish community in the small town, it was sold in 1951 to a private owner who turned it into a movie theatre in the 1960s. A craftsman who was involved in the renovations explained:
“The order was [...] the synagogue will be converted into a cinema [umfunktioniert]. Back then, no one was surprised about it or gave it a thought. Today one would think about it much more. Today one has much more knowledge about these things, but at the time, one just did what the master said.”9
Master craftsman or Führer, there was obviously not a big difference in this generation. Many continuities were unbroken after 1945. Visitors to the cinema remember that they spent pleasant hours of their youth there, watching mainly Heimat films, doctor’s films, and love stories. After the cinema, the synagogue served as a Spar supermarket until 1981. A shopper remembers:
The synagogue served as a supermarket until the 1970s and then as a storage room until the end of the 1980s. It wasn’t until the 50th anniversary of the November pogrom night in 1988 that the residents of the town finally “woke up” from their long “sleep”. They formed a discussion group and arranged for the town to buy back the synagogue. A memorial was established there, where the history of the expelled and murdered Jews of this town is exhibited. Today, the city’s tourist office lists on its homepage the five top sights of the city. The synagogue is not among them.10
To make sure that something is remembered it needs to be communicated; what is passed over in silence is quickly forgotten. This applies primarily to the trauma for which words are lacking, and for which a new language must be created. Robert Anthelme, after his liberation from the concentration camp, began his account with the sentence: “When we finally had the chance to begin to speak, we discovered that we had no words.”11 But there was even more missing than an appropriate language, and that was an empathetic audience willing to listen to their story. The Israeli psychotherapist Dan Bar-On used the image of “a double wall of silence” to explain that there is not only the wall that restrains the speaker, but also the wall that wards off the listener.12
Silence is also considered a shield of defence for the guilt and shame that threatens the sense of pride and self-esteem. A social climate built on a strong sense of honour, fear of exposure, and ostracism sustains silence; to rise above it requires a shared urge to clear up a crime, to show respect for the victims, and generate empathy.
Finally, silence is considered a mode of forgetting in the space of knowledge for everything that is no longer circulated and therefore falls out of communication. German colonial history, for example, had been a vital part of school education in Imperial Germany: “Ehe der Morgen graut / Hat der Kaiser schon an der Flotte gebaut” (Before dawn, the Kaiser has already built the fleet) they had to write on their slates. This history has long since ceased to be a topic taught in school, but its relicts are right now becoming visible again in the public space. They are rediscovered and hotly discussed as Germans start to look at them also through the eyes of new immigrants.
Let me sum up with a few general remarks on the dynamics of remembering and forgetting. Memory, in which remembering and forgetting are always intertwined, works between the extremes of “storing everything” and “deleting everything”. Different gradations and spaces unfold for that which is only temporarily lost and can be accessed again later.
Remembering, in other words, is not the opposite of forgetting, since many things can be retrieved. But remembering is also a fraction of what has been forgotten in total, which we must think of as a vast land of the no-more and nothingness that surrounds us. Forgetting can therefore be partial, transitory, and periodic, but also total. When we have forgotten what we have forgotten, it has become invisible and inaccessible. But it remains observable in the process of disappearing or reappearing.
Human memory is self-reflexive. Everyone is able and authorised to analyse these processes in herself and himself. Art plays a special role in this form of monitoring, as it creates a mirror of self-reflection that enables a society to watch and think about its acts of remembering and forgetting.
1 The Rock: A Pageant Play Written for Performance at Sadler‘s Wells Theatre, 28 May–9 June 1934 (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), p. 85. Words by T.S. Eliot and music by Martin Shaw. 2 Ruth Klüger, Weiter leben. Eine Jugend (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1993), pp. 179 et. al. 3 Friedrich Georg Jünger, Gedächtnis und Erinnerung (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1957), pp. 16–17. On the term “latency”, see Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht and Florian Klinger, eds, Latenz. Blinde Passagiere in den
Geisteswissenschaften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011). 4 Susanne Partsch, Moderne Kunst, Die 101 wichtigsten
Fragen (Munich: Beck, 2005), pp. 57–58. 5 Bernhard Jussen, ed., Signal Christian Boltanski (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2004), pp. 63–65. 6 Oliver König, “Die Verantwortung bleibt verschüttet. 10 Jahre nach Einsturz in Köln”, FAZ (published online 1 March 2019), https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/ 10-jahre-nach-einsturz-des-koelner-stadtarchivsverschuettete-verantwortung-16065422.html 7 Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). 8 “Stadt Haigerloch”, https://www.haigerloch.de/de/Home 9 Utz Jeggle, Erinnerungen an die Haigerlocher Juden: ein Mosaik (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2006). 10 “Stadt Haigerloch”, www.haigerloch.de/de/Home 11 Robert Anthelme, Das Menschengeschlecht (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1992). 12 Dan Bar-On, Die Last des Schweigens. Gespräche mit
Kindern von NSTätern (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1993).
ALEIDA ASSMANN is a professor of English Literature and Cultural Theory. The focus of her research is cultural and communicative memory. Together with Jan Assmann, she was awarded the 2018 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2018. Her recent publications in English include Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (2011); Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity (2015); and Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime (2020).
Aleida Assmann gave this lecture on 8 June 2021 as part of the series of talks on Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives at the Akademie der Künste.
AND THE ARCHIVE OF THE PRESENT
AN INCITEMENT TO DEBATE BY MAX CZOLLEK
ARCHIVES AND THE RADICALLY DIVERSE PRESENT
I should like to dive straight in with the following assumption, one that I shall return to again and again in this article: German society has become a different one in recent years. That is why we are able to conceive of it differently. And it is threatened by the past, so we have to conceive of it differently.
This assumption can be justified, firstly, empirically: because this society has in fact become a different, radically diverse one, we are able to think of it differently. Here, a changed reality precedes the ability to also intellectually reframe it. And, secondly, it can be justified normatively: because the present is haunted by the ghosts of the past, we should rethink it. In saying this, I wish to stress two points: the relevance of the past, which is always reframed within histories, for the present. And the relevance of thinking itself, which also has to change in order for things to change.
But first, a word on the relationship between the concepts of the past and history. Matthias Sauerbruch introduced what I consider a useful conceptual distinction in the March issue of the Journal der Künste: While the past is “irretrievably lost, history is produced continuously anew – through interpretations of the past in hindsight”.1
Brecht writes: “Fed by yesterday, today advances into tomorrow.” And that also means that tomorrow is today’s point of arrival, which becomes what it feeds on. And this nourishment is called history. So, with what food do archives feed the present? What future do we thus make possible? What present are we depicting? And what stories about ourselves do we meaningfully want to tell?
I’m highly intrigued by this wanting. Because it tells us a lot about the We – which in Germany one might all too readily hope has already had its day. And yet, it seems, the We continues to exist. And it exists below the threshold of the statements of intent spoken into microphones
or expressed in editorials. Obviously, we no longer want to be part of a German We. But we continue to think and feel a certain way.
I have dealt with this implicit reproduction of belonging in more detail in my books Desintegriert Euch! and Gegenwartsbewältigung. 2 Such systematic reticence would be curious if it weren’t characteristic of the standard procedure for reconstructing German identity after 1945, especially from the 1980s onwards. Reconstruction seems to work especially well when we assume only the best intentions for ourselves, our families, or our workplaces: from “Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi” to the rebuilding of the Berlin Palace to the question: “Where are you from?” Far and wide, not a hint of ill will.
I’m also interested in the professional processes that lead us to exclude certain voices as irrelevant, marginal, unprofessional, and so on. And in a way that ultimately results in statistical imbalances at publishing houses, when it comes to prizes, grants, and reviews, and also in the archives that reflect society’s power structures.
Let’s just consider the following data on the Archives of the Akademie der Künste: one in five of the artists in this archive is female; Aras Ören is one of the very few authors of “guest worker” literature whose estate has been included in the Archives; and authors such as May Ayim and, with her, Afro-German literature still have no place in these Archives. Therefore, although we may think we take decisions with the best of intentions and on the basis of objective and professional criteria, it seems that these Archives also play their part in reproducing the structural inequalities still existing in our society.
I am certainly preaching to the converted when I also underline the earnestness of the work of the Akademie der Künste. Art is a central element of societies because it allows them a place of reflection and an exploration of the ideas it has formed about itself. And of the violence that these ideas produce. In this way, art is not only a cure, but also a symptom of the disease we call society.
An institution like the Archives of the Akademie der Künste is not impartial in its work: The selection of artworks to be included in an archive always means the exclusion of the works that are not included. This is not in itself surprising. A German art archive is not like a Library of Babel. To put it another way, is it possible that the very parameters of importance and relevance in place for the purposes of selection are themselves part of the problem? Is it that artists, audiences, critics, and archives themselves engage in a specific form of complicity in their notions of what constitutes “good” art worthy of preservation and patronage, a complicity that has far more to do with the darker sides of the present than we are comfortable with, or which reflects how we see ourselves?
THE ARCHIVE OF THE PRESENT
This brings me to my second assumption: It is not only art, which is after all produced at a certain time, that is embedded in a corresponding social present and its structures of need, so too are the poetics – that is, the dominant ideas about what good art is. This relationship, which I have elaborated upon elsewhere, manifests itself in the complicity just mentioned.3
That all those participating have only the best of intentions is a prerequisite for it all to function. Because without the mutual assurance that something relevant is being shown, evaluated, applauded, booed, or collected here, something is heralded that is always revealed by a look at the past: change. Or once again a variation on Brecht: “On the bed of the Spree the pebbles are shifting.”
And perhaps that is what we are experiencing right now: those people who only the day before yesterday were able to calmly define not only what literature and art are but also how they work, now feeling under pressure to justify their categories and viewpoints.
And this pressure comes from very different directions – be it from feminist literary criticism, from post-migrant theatre, from criticism of racist practices in theatrical environments, from the question of the middle-class conception of literature, from a radical critique of the relationship between humanity and nature in architecture – as at the current Venice Biennale – or from a notion of self-defensive poetry, as I have been developing for some time now together with Jo Frank and the authors of Verlagshaus Berlin.4
In my view, there is something to be said for interpreting this situation as the outcome of a process in which society’s radical diversity is becoming increasingly visible even in areas that classical Marxist terminology would perhaps assign to the superstructure, which Jürgen Habermas would call spheres of cultural reproduction and Gramsci spaces of metapolitics.
This would seem, at any rate, to be a process of catching up, because social reality has already moved on, and now government, cultural institutions, sports facilities, opera houses and theatres, and literary institutions have to consider how to respond to this. And this also applies, of course, to archives.
Or, more precisely, this applies to archives if and insofar as they see themselves as places whose task it is to map the dynamics of society, that is, to address what the adjective “plural” qualifying “democracy” actually means, which brings me to the first of five propositions that I wish to put forward for discussion:
The task of an institution like the Akademie der Künste is to represent not a section of the population and its ideas of what good or relevant art is, but German society in its radical diversity.
In preparation for this article, I also dropped in on the Archives of the Akademie der Künste. The building is right next to the Berlin Charité, where I was born. So many stories, wherever you look.
Superficially, I was interested in digging up some hard facts about the holdings in the Archives: how many Afro-Germans, how many Jews, how many women, how many queers, how many guest workers and postmigrants, and so on. But, in the end, we had a lovely, long, and thoughtful conversation about the role of art archives in general – and the role of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste in particular.
One of the arguments from that conversation which has lingered in my mind was that archives are always renewing themselves by the way they are used. That they need continual (re)interpretation to be able to gain concrete form. And I think to myself: absolutely! For archives are repositories, collections of things that have to be sifted and combed through again and again. At the same time, the fact that only a fifth of the Archives overall are devoted to women, for example, remains a problem, even if one adds up, from a feminist perspective, the assistant directors who wrote the notes, the dressmakers who made the costumes for the performances, and so on. In the language of biblical research, one would still have to ask about those things that have not found their way into the Archives and remain, thus, only apocryphally associated with the collections.
Allow me to stay briefly with the biblical imagery. The selection, which finally crystallises in Judaism into the Torah and in Christianity into the Old and New Testaments, for example, allows the community at the time to make new interpretations. The many Christian reinterpretations and denominations speak a clear language here. And in Judaism, it is said appreciatively that scripture turns a different face to each generation.
Of course, the same is also true of archives. In this respect, the people I talked to were right to refer to the “interpretation of archives”, a process that takes place anew with each reading and which in the jargon is known as “indexing”. And the silenced, the suppressed, the ignored, and the excluded have also undoubtedly found expression in archives.
But I wouldn’t want to bet on it. Because if repression is successful, we no longer know what has been lost. Especially if we assume that the parameters of what are understood to be important and relevant are themselves historical. Even in the present day we are not immune to the effects of the ideology of what is “good” art.
And this means that I have arrived on the other side of the equation – on the side of those who use archives. If my reflexive sociological focus on my own artistic practice has made one thing clear to me, it is that the reception of artworks is not at all autonomous, but runs along narrowly bounded by viewing habits, viewing expectations, and the need structures of the public.
Archives, as described, are institutions whose officials decide what is worth preserving. The process leading up to this decision is known as “evaluation” in archive jargon. The linguistic reference to biblical research is appropriate here as well, in that the concept of the canon, which has also become part of our thinking about culture, also comes from this field of research.
In a certain sense, then, the processes of inclusion and exclusion in archives and the processes of their always limited (re)interpretation seem to be interrelated and, not infrequently, even mutually reinforcing. It is impossible to tell which came first. But that they have happened and continue to do so is nevertheless beyond doubt. A little bit of investigative research.
THOMAS MANN AND THE SEDUCTION OF SELF-CRITICISM
In early 2021, I came across a speech by Thomas Mann that the embittered recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature had given in English to an audience of thousands at the Library of Congress on 29 May 1945.
At this time, Mann himself could already look back on a long and rather serpentine political career. In 1918 he had published an openly reactionary, anti-democratic, nationalistic epic entitled Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, which did not make it any easier for the fledgling
and highly unstable Weimar Republic to establish itself as Germany’s first democracy. His outlook only changed in the years that followed, such that Mann finally emerged in 1933 as a staunch opponent of National Socialism who recorded pro-democracy speeches while exiled in California.
In the speech, Mann makes several observations, including the connection between Protestantism, German idealism, and the disengagement of German artists from everyday political events. The following proposition of his caught my eye: “Wicked Germany is only merely Germany gone astray.”5
With these words, Mann wishes to stress that exiled German authors cannot simply be regarded as representatives of a good Germany. Rather, they are also part of what had happened in Nazi Germany, because both – the noble and the base – are already inherent in German history.
This sounds good on the face of it, because Mann is taking his audience and himself to task for trying to account for how what happened could happen. And insofar as he attests that German culture is closely interwoven with politics, he is more progressive than many contemporary commentators who would much sooner have not heard anything about the links between art and the violent aspects of a society in which it arises.
At this point, however, we also reach the limits of Mann’s analysis. For the speech not only delineates a self-criticism of one of the most important representatives of German culture in 1945, but it also draws a line – not only underlining what he says, but also what he leaves unsaid.
Mann’s distinction between Germany good and evil, for example, seems to focus exclusively on the German cultural canon, which is also suggested by his reference to the Faustian nature of German culture.6 The proposition of the interconnected good and evil Germany thus also obscures the presence of entirely different viewpoints in German cultural history.
This is not entirely irrelevant, especially considering the years 1933 to 1945, because Jewish, queer, and feminist voices, the voices of Sinti and Roma, people with disabilities, and so on, had already been silenced within Germany by the time Mann delivered his speech.
We can perhaps speak here of a “double forgetting”. By this I mean a dynamic in which the critique itself still means the reproduction of certain aspects of what is being critiqued. In Mann’s case, for example, I suggest that his critique of evil Germany is itself still a reproduction of specific ideas about Germany – and about who participates in this Germany.
Even at the time of the greatest crisis, Mann’s selfcritical appraisal is unable to distance itself from a specific nationalist conception of German culture. That is no mean matter. Had he instead turned to the voices burned in books and artworks, forgotten, and repressed by the Nazis, he could not have asserted the juxtaposition of good and evil Germany in this way at all. There would simply have been more than would have fit into the narrative of the magnificent and at the same time flawed nature of German culture.
What I am concerned with in this critique is the expansion of the space of what is called “Germany” or “German culture” – because this is also something that can be seen as an expansion of the parameters of importance and relevance. Of course, there have always been other cultural practices in Germany: views, for example, that saw art not as an attempt at personal spiritual transcendence, but as a survival strategy.
Which brings me to my second proposition:
Art has long been understood as a place that transcends the temporality and contingency of daytoday political events. But this is not the only perspective that has existed and continues to exist. For art has always been an expression of those who had to fear for their social or physical survival and for whom aesthetic practices were part of their survival and resistance strategies.
HIRSCH GLIK AND THE SUGGESTIVE POWER OF THE KNOWN
At this point, I also wish to illuminate the foundations of my own reflections on the radical diversity of society and of archives. For this has so far largely taken place in a national context. This limitation is inadmissible insofar as it fosters the fiction that art and its archiving respect national borders.
Or, as my good friend Daniel Kahn put it in his album Lost Causes: “A border is not art / it’s just a frame.”7
Perhaps this is my own form of double forgetting. For a lecture I gave almost exactly a year ago in the “Zwiesprachen” (Conversation) series of the Lyrik Kabinett in Munich, I discussed the Yiddish poet Hirsch Glik and what I called at the time an “archive of militant poetry”.8
Hirsch Glik was born on 24 April 1922 in Vilnius, which was then in Poland. He grew up there, wrote poetry from an early age, was part of the left-wing Zionist youth association Hashomer Hatzair and the youngest member of the artists’ group Yung Vilne. In 1941, he was incarcerated with the Jewish population of Vilnius by the National Socialists in the newly established ghetto, which was gradually liquidated over the following two years.
There were several prominent Eastern European Jewish intellectuals in the Vilna Ghetto: Avrom Sutzkever, probably the most famous Yiddish poet of this generation, along with Abba Kovner and Vitka Kempner, who together founded DIN – that famous group of Jewish avengers – after the war, whom the aforementioned Daniel Kahn immortalised in his song “Six Million Germans”.
9
The Fareinikte Partisaner Organisatzije (FPO), one of the most important and much sung-about Jewish partisan organisations in the resistance against the Nazis, was also founded in Vilnius in 1942. As a child I was often sung to sleep with the following lines to the melody of Und weil der Mensch ein Mensch ist (And because a person is a person): “Hey FPO, mir sejnen do / mutige und dreiste zur Schlacht / Partisanen noch heint, gehen schlogen den feind / in nem Kampf hoben Arbejter Macht.” (“Hey FPO, we’re here / brave and brazen to do battle / partisans today, go beat the enemy / in battle workers have power).”
Only when researching Hirsch Glik, who wrote some of the most prominent partisan songs before being shot by the Nazis, did it become clear to me that the Vilnius poets, for most of the time, held their pen in their right hand and the gun in their left. And that during the Holocaust, the viewpoint of Eastern European Jewish artists and intellectuals was very different from that of the Jews of Western Europe and Germany.
When Hannah Arendt writes in her 1960 essay on friendship, for example, that genuine friendship is not possible under the conditions of the stetl and the ghetto, this is not only a Jewish philosopher speaking here, but also an author who can afford her normative individualism.10 Things were different in the stetl and the ghetto – of course friendship existed there.
The difference of sentiment between the inhabitants of the ghetto and Arendt is perhaps rather that in the ghetto one was also collectively at the mercy of the collective fate, without any chance of escape or hiding. Not least because of this, highly individual points of view developed here. This is also underlined by a leaflet that Abba Kovner, then head of the FPO, distributed among the inhabitants of the ghetto on 1 January 1942:
“Let us not be led like sheep to the slaughter! It is true we are weak and helpless, but the only answer to the enemy is: Resist! / Brothers! Better to fall as free fighters than live by the mercy of murderers. /Resist! Resist to the last breath!”11
I must confess that I find it hard to imagine such a situation in concrete terms. And maybe that’s why I feel a greater affinity to the writings of Hannah Arendt to Max Horkheimer, and of Walter Benjamin to Theodor W. Adorno. That’s the point I want to underline with this example: that it’s not enough to simply include Jews, women, queers, Sinti, and Roma, and so on, in the archives, and assume that you’ve already achieved radical diversity.
In this respect, archives do not have a problem with “diversity”. At least, the lack or presence of diversity does not seem to me to be the only crucial variable that should be at issue. Because if, as shown, diversity can also reproduce power relations, then we should be talking not only about diversity per se, but about questioning our understanding of culture: what do we value as contributions to culture; what stories do we want these contributions to tell of Germany good and evil, of dissidence and the ruling elite, of reaction and counterculture, of German and non-German?
So what signature does a work of art need for it to be read as a Jewish contribution? And what signature does a Jewish work of art need for it to be understood not as the work of a victim, but as a contribution to German culture, to the archives of modernity, to the Akademie der Künste? Who or what decides whether a Jewish author receives a brass plaque on the wall of a house or a Stolperstein?
The example of Glik and the partisan poets of Vilnius, for me, marks a point where my view of the Jewish perspective has become more nuanced once again. Could it be that even in our attention to a Jewish reaction to the Shoah, we have fallen prey to German and Western European dominance? Could it be that here, too, we encounter the double forgetting that I just observed in Thomas Mann’s speech and in my own text?
This question concerns not only the past, but also the way we allow people to take a stand in the present. Or, to put it another way, looking at history creates a certain idea of what position the people labelled with a certain adjective can take in the present.
Or, to express it again in relation to archives, if you want to narrate the present differently, you also have to rearrange the past. And this brings me to my third proposition:
Art is also the place where the defenceless take up arms. And there exists a series of verbal and material archives of selfdefensive art that must find their way into an “Archive of the Present”, which must be recreated again and again.
RADICAL DIVERSITY AND THE ARCHIVE OF THE PRESENT
What would it mean if we invited Glik and Adorno to the same table to talk about utopia, violence, and art? How did the perspectives differ between Vilnius and Frankfurt am Main, Pacific Palisades and Eastern Europe, between Glik the man and Adorno the man?
I would like to assume that it is not necessary to play them off against each other. Not necessary to decide who is more right, who is more Jewish, or who is more German. And it is precisely this shift in outlook that I want to stress: that we no longer speak of Jewish, female, queer contributions to German culture, but rather of the fact that it was all these works that created what we call culture today.
Even today, Jewish history in Germany is far too often told as the history of the Germanisation of the Jews, the history of the women’s movement, as the history of women’s gradual ascent into domains of the male norm, and queer history as the increasing normalisation of varied forms of desire.
I find it remarkable that all these examples basically tell the same story: namely that a discriminated minority becomes part of a culture when it sheds its differentness. A narrative that is so well-established in the present that the integrational thinking behind it no longer stands out, and instead, when in doubt, you boast that you have told a story about German–Jewish relations.
As I’ve already mentioned, the tricky thing about the effect of ideology is precisely this: that it works best when the unanimous opinion is that everyone is only doing what’s best. And what we are left with is the reference to the skewed statistics, which in the end prove what one no longer wants to admit to oneself: that there is still a problem with publishing programmes, the gender pay gap, and even the make-up of the archives.
What I would like to call an “Archive of the Present” can also be formulated as an alternative to those parameters of importance and relevance given as guidelines for the collection of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste. Or, rather, the parameters can now be precisely stated. This brings me to the fourth proposition:
The point of the “Archive of the Present” is to explain how we became what we are today. This has consequences for the issue of what of the present and the past is worth preserving, insofar as the familiar must always be reframed, and what was previously excluded must be scrutinised for its present relevance, and, if necessary, reincluded.
There is and has been not only the good and evil Germany that Thomas Mann spoke of, but also a Germany of “the Others” which extended beyond Germany’s borders. This is also related to the issue mentioned earlier about poetics. For the interpretation by this Germany of “the Others” in the relationship, between aspiration and reality and between art and politics, differs in many cases from that which is suggested by the usual parameters used to assess the importance and relevance of modern art. Namely, as concrete practices of resistance, of survival, of the attempt to remain different.
Therefore, let’s shift closer to the plural society in which we already live today. After all, it seems that what we call German culture has always been the result of the differentness of its contributors. And by acknowledging the importance and relevance of their work, we understand a little better how we all became what we are today.
That such a shift in perspective is possible also relates to the fact that we are confronted with a changed societal present today. Suddenly there are post-migrant, Jewish, and Black voices, Sinti and Roma voices, and voices of the disabled and LGBTQI+. Not that they didn’t exist before, but they can no longer be ignored or overlooked today: in literature, classical music, new music, hip-hop, theatre, film, opera, painting, the visual arts, action art, drama, and performance art. They are what we must call contemporary culture.
And this brings me to my final proposition, which was also the first assumption this text opened with:
German society has become a different one in recent years. That is why we are able to conceive of it differently. And it is threatened by the past, so we have to conceive of it differently.
For me, then, art means an attempt to think things differently without forgetting what has happened in the past. Art is a way of conversing with the dead. But without forgetting just how much their absence hurts.
Finally, I would like to add the very personal conviction that this pain should be an essential part of the Archive of the Present. The inconsolability of the living that things have happened the way they have. And a commemoration of all those we have lost along the way through old age and illness, flight or murder. Who cannot be with us. And who took our strength away with them, strength that we only regained when pen touched paper.
And here I come to where any transparent argumentation would have to end: with myself and my way of perceiving the world.
MAX CZOLLEK is an author and lives in Berlin. He is a member of the poetry collective G13 and co-editor of the magazine Jalta – Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart. The poetry volumes Druckkammern (2012), Jubeljahre (2015), and Grenzwerte (2019) were published by Verlagshaus Berlin, the essays Desintegriert Euch! (2018) and Gegenwartsbewältigung (2020) by Carl Hanser Verlag. Czollek works for the theatre throughout the German-speaking world, most recently the Tage der JüdischMuslimischen Leitkultur (2020). Since June 2021, he has been the academic and artistic director of the Coalition for Pluralistic Public Discourse (CPPD) initiative. Next spring, the exhibition he is curating Revenge: History and Fantasy will open at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt am Main. 1 Matthias Sauerbruch, “Metamorphoses – City between History and Conscience”, Journal der Künste 15 (2021), pp. 48–51, here p. 49. 2 Max Czollek, Desintegriert Euch! (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2018); Max Czollek, Gegenwartsbewältigung (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2020). 3 See Max Czollek, beuys will be beuys. beuys will be deutsch. einige gedanken über kunst im postnationalsozialistischen deutschland, Düsseldorf, 21 July 2021 (podcast in German), https://beuys2021.de/index.php/de/media/ podcasts 4 For example, Haus der Poesie, Das Lesen der Anderen.
Wehrhafte Poesie, Berlin 2020 (podcast in German), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHhAdmFEwjE 5 Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans”, in Literary
Lectures Presented at the Library of Congress (Washington: Library of Congress, 1973), pp. 32–46, here p. 45. 6 See ibid. p. 46. 7 Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird, “Inner Emigration”, on the album Lost Causes (Berlin: Oriente Music, 2011). 8 See Max Czollek, “Sog nit kejn mol, as du gejsst dem leztn weg.” Zu einem Archiv wehrhafter Poesie bei Hirsch Glik (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2020). 9 Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird, “Six Million Germans”, on the album Partisans & Parasites (Berlin: Oriente Music, 2009). 10 See Hannah Arendt, Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren
Zeiten. Rede über Lessing (Munich: Piper-Bücherei, 1960), pp. 21–22; Hannah Arendt, Men in dark Times, trans. Clara and Richard Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968). 11 Abba Kovner, “Lassen wir uns nicht wie die Schafe zur Schlachtbank führen!” (appeal of 1.1.1942), quoted from
Gedenkorte Europa, entry on Abba Kovner (1918–87), https://www.gedenkorte-europa.eu/de_de/articleabba-kovner-1918-ndash-1987.html
Max Czollek gave this lecture on 20 July 2021 in connection with the series of talks entitled Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives at the Akademie der Künste.
