Project MUSE - The Archive The Archive Peter Fritzsche (bio) "No one," wrote Pascal, "dies so poor that he does not leave something behind." Setting the scene at the moment of a single individual's death and drawing attention to personal possessions, Pascal conjures up the material traces of a single lifetime. A lived life creates physical effects: a sheaf of letters, a lucky coin, or a small fortune, things that construct correspondences between experience and materiality. Putting the stress on the larger world reflected in small objects, Pascal ennobles even the most modest lives and places all individuals in the same passage from life to death. Nearly three hundred later, Walter Benjamin reflected on Pascal's assertion. To Pascal's things he added "memories too." He then went on to subtract from what he had just augmented: "although these do not always find an heir." 1 What Benjamin accents is not the material endurance of things but the variable operations of memory. There is no longer the unproblematic correspondence between a life lived and a life remembered, but the difficult endeavor of remembering and the more general prospect of forgetting. And for Benjamin it is not so much what the dead leave behind as it is what the living end up retrieving.

He thereby poses the question of attentiveness, the historically situated presence or absence of the habit of cultivating memories. Moreover, these habits of cultivation operate across time: heirs are daughters and grandsons. At the remove of a generation or two, they are the ones who undertake the work of memory. Finally, in place of the sonorous universal by which Pascal affirmed the material existence of all men and women, Benjamin implies particular heirs who need to feel a connection to the past in order for memories to remain alive. In contrast to Pascal's materialism, Benjamin proposes a [End Page 15] cultural interpretation of remembering in which traces are not simply left behind and recollection is not assumed, in which mental habits across time rather than physical things in the present bring the past into view, and in which specific heirs undertake the work of memorialization. Although Pascal refers to things and thereby builds an implicit archive of past lives, it is Benjamin who imagines the space in which the historical archive was constructed in order to ward off oblivion, to make the particular case for a historical subject, to identify the responsibility of the heirs to cultivate specific stories in the past. The three hundred years that separate Benjamin from Pascal dramatize the historicity of the uses of history.

They suggest the specific historical circumstances under which the past does and does not find heirs, is and is not energetically recollected. Benjamin writes in reference to a "crisis of memory," 2 a historical moment in the modern age when there is both a surfeit of unusable pasts and a deficit of usable history, when individuals die in the face of general indifference while self-appointed heirs energetically look for particular memories. It is in the distinction between Pascal and Benjamin that a history of the archive can be conceived. Archives are not comprehensive collections of things, the effects left behind by the dead, nor are they arbitrary accumulations of remnants and leftovers. The archive is the production of the heirs, who must work to find connections from one generation to the next and thereby acknowledge the ongoing disintegration of the past. The heirs also distinguish themselves as such: a cultural group that knows itself by cultivating a particular historical trajectory. In the West, the nation has been the dominant form of this particularity, reinforcing a common past within its borders and emphasizing the difference of cultural origins across its borders.

It is a specific, historically contingent configuration of time and space that produced what Jacques Derrida referred to in another context as "archive fever." 3 If most conceptions of the archive emphasize how the archive has shaped history, I want to examine how German history has shaped the archive. At the most general level, archival production rests on the premise that the past is no longer the business of the present and must be handled carefully in order to recognize the difference of its periodicity and to facilitate the retrieval of the past in however fragmentary form. But the energy of archival activity is founded on the assumption that artifacts and [End Page 16] documents can be made to tell special stories about social identity. The arduous endeavor of provenience, the concern for getting right chronology and context, functions to establish particular trajectories of the past and thereby to create a common past (and a shared future) that is culturally distinct. The archive thus produces two effects: the boundedness of identity in time and space and the synchronization of time and space within those bounds. Precisely because they are the means to establish provenience and thus expose cultural distinctions, archives are crucial to the infrastructure of the modern nation-state.

In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, the archive arrives at the nineteenth-century moment when the state feels a responsibility toward the particular heritage of the past encompassed by its territory. 4 The effort of the nation to distinguish itself from other nations or to resist the claims of supranational entities such as empires has important, if sometimes neglected, democratic ramifications. The stories of the archive persistently exceeded state-sanctioned histories. In the first place, ordinary people increasingly recognized themselves as inhabitants of cultural territories distinguished by language and custom. Indeed, it was domestic settings—the food at the table, the architecture of the farmhouse, the annual cycle of festivals—that served as the primary markers of national identity, which had the effect of enfranchising citizens into history and authorizing their own vernacular versions of national history. Moreover, the work of the heirs created intimacies among strangers who held in common a national past. As Germans came to regard each other as contemporaries, they took interest in the tribulations of fellow citizens, tied their own autobiographies to the national epic, and thereby intertwined personal with national history. Precisely because the ordinary could stand for the national, the story of the nation never existed in a single defining version.

It was reworked into vernaculars, sub-versions that existed as potential subversions. 5 Thus collective disasters and particularly wars had the effect of both intensifying the personal experience of the national and legitimizing individual and even dissident versions. Put another way, the onerous requirements for fighting war in the modern era necessitated upholstering a common past, while the sheer violence of war worked to jeopardize that unity, with both motion and countermotion adding to the paperwork of history. [End Page 17] The history of the archive is embedded in the recognition of loss. For archives to collect the past, the past has to come to mind as something imperiled and distinctive. This presumes a dramatization of historical movement that fashions temporal periods based on the radical difference between now and then, which, in turn, invites the recognition of radical difference between here and there. The feverish part of archival activity is to distinguish difference in order to create a bounded national subject characterized by a separate history that is held in common by contemporaries. The establishment of historical and cultural archives in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century illustrates the effort to create these particulars of national identity.

This bounded identity was also the premise for the vernacular archival activity of ordinary citizens, who more and more came to see their lives in historical terms. Loss continued to facilitate the production of archives after the unification of the German empire. In the twentieth century, the world wars, especially, encouraged the state to revisualize its citizens in order to more effectively mobilize them, producing new inventories of popular sovereignty in the Weimar period and racial archives in the Third Reich. Yet the experience of mass death and the Holocaust ended up creating dramatically divergent life stories that made it ever more difficult to hold onto the idea of a common German past or find shared memories among victims and perpetrators. After 1945, Benjamin's heirs in East and West Germany, in Israel and the United States, picked up very different strands of German history. At the turn of the twentieth-first century, the German archive can no longer be premised on the national rehabilitation of loss. It can only provide testimony to the violence of the attempt to do so. The Recognition of Difference It was not memory as such, but the specter of oblivion that constituted the German archive and prepared for the reorganization of the German past at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The menace of French empire, the initial "German catastrophe" two hundred years ago, serves as the point of origin for the German archive, the purpose of which was to identify a specifically German past, a genealogy called Vaterland. The French Revolution had the fundamental effect of dramatizing the movement of history [End Page 18] into distinct periods separated by epochal breaks—1806 will be followed by 1871, 1914/18, 1933, 1945 and 1989/90. With the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire in 1805/6, the continuities connecting past and present shattered and the past increasingly came into view as a vast field of ruins. This entailed a remarkable revision in the way history was understood. 6 While Napoleon endeavored to organize ruins in a way that would represent the historical inevitability and endurance of the French Empire, German statesmen and intellectuals recast medieval relics to signify the political defeat but also the historical existence of the German nation.

This was a bold epistemological step because it took ruins out of natural time and resituated them in historical time so that the traces of the past could serve as the particular evidence for political and religious confrontations, defeats and occupations, and undeveloped national alternatives. Ruins thereby acquired a half-life. If properly preserved, provenienced and analyzed, they could be made to speak for the nation. In the early 1800s, the German art collector Sulpiz Boisserée made the most sustained case for the separate national development of Germany. He rejected Napoleon's assumption that the French empire represented the most complete development of universal history, a schema in which Germany's medieval ruins occupied the subordinate status of precursor. Instead he argued that the German masters and Gothic cathedrals represented Germany's historical particularity that was no less credible than France's. He thereby reanimated the broken-down past as a national alternative to empire. In contrast to the centrally deposited "exemplary specimens" in Paris, Boisserée made the case for the eloquence of "recovered relics" in context. 7 It was provenience that became the key to establishing separate national trajectories that resisted the logic of universal history.

Boisserée's journeys up and down the Rhine, in which he catalogued the ruins of medieval abbeys, cathedrals and castles, were the first steps toward the creation of a German archive. Medieval history—first in 1806 in the form of debris, then as archival material, and later as reworked narrative—became German history; old time was turned into new space that defined the nation and repudiated the center–periphery model of empire. With the defeat of Napoleon, the German states established the first official regional archives to house the huge numbers of papers that with the end of the many sovereign entities of the Holy Roman Empire had lost their practical value and could now be rearranged as the prehistory [End Page 19] of the German nation. The preservation and analysis of these and other religious and local documents were overseen by the state-sponsored historical agency established by Baron vom Stein in 1819, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, which published dozens of multivolumed editions of medieval documents. 8 The attention to Germany's medieval heritage is striking and absorbed most of the energies of Germany's historians for the rest of the nineteenth century.

One practical reason for this is that the persistence of the absolutist state meant that Prussian records even from the eighteenth century did not become properly historical until 1918 and remained scattered in ministries rather than collected in a central archive. 9 But the medieval past also functioned as the dominant metonym for the German nation as a whole because it provided the key marker for the difference on which German identity was based. The establishment of Prussian state archives and Stein's Monumenta Germaniae Historica, as well as Boisserée's collection of early-modern German art, Karl Friedrich Schinkel's like-minded efforts to preserve German monuments, and even Jacob and Wilhem Grimm's fairy tales were all attempts to create a common, durable and specific German past. Of course, it would be senseless to argue that all the inhabitants of the German states suddenly regarded themselves in terms of an encompassing German identity and recognized as their own the medieval past that Boisserée and others put into view. Yet the extraordinary success of the Grimm fairy tales in the years after their first publication in 1812 indicates how well the German story resonated with German contemporaries.

Despite their transnational appeal—the first English edition came out in 1823—the fairy tales are definitively the Grimms' fairy tales and consistently evoked a particular idea of the German landscape. Moreover, the brothers insisted on the specifically Germanic origins of the tales. Indeed, the characters in the fairy tales were very much like the readers the Grimms hoped to find: they comprised locals as well as cosmopolitans, commoners as well as aristocrats, women and children as well as men, perfect examples of the vernacular culture the books came to represent. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Kleine Ausgabe's collection of fifty of the most popular tales had sold two million copies in the German-speaking realm of fifty million people. 10 The fact that the Grimms' collection of German tales stood on the shelves of so many readers suggests the ways in which ordinary households [End Page 20] established archives. Although the point should not be pressed too hard, the new historical context allowed Germans to see themselves quite literally as contemporaries (Zeitgenossen), Benjamin's heirs who shared national history and historicized national territory.

As a result, the most ordinary people came to take an interest in each other and to read their lives against the ordeal of the nation. The nineteenth century "was swamped with unremarkable self-revelations," notes Peter Gay. Thousands wrote these up, even "men and women with no claim to fame of any kind. They left their memoirs moldering in attics or buried in local archives, or asked a job printer to make an unpretentious book." 11 Autobiographical supply flourished because it appealed to biograph-ical demand. What authorized the histories of ordinary people was not simply notions of enfranchisement which came with the French Revolution but the tissues of connectedness that corresponded to a historical worldview and national identity. The idea of the nation both sentimentalized and popularized ordinary stories. It served as a social and literary point of reconciliation, making the ordeal of the nation the vehicle for recognizing the fate of the individual. The immense paperwork of history in the nineteenth century struggled to bring the distress of the one into correspondence with the other. The People's Archive It is remarkable that the sound of Napoleon's cannons continued to echo throughout the nineteenth century.

The French Revolution, the Wars of Liberation and the outsized figure of Napoleon dominated the production and consumption of popular German history; Napoleon lent his name to fictional antiheroes as late as 1918 in Heinrich Mann's Man of Straw. Nearly one hundred years after the event, Germans still drew attention to the imperial menace and the fragile nature of national relics. But it was the wars of the twentieth century that dramatically reconfigured the archive because total war posed the question of the survival and definition of the German people. Almost immediately, World War I intruded into the lives of almost every German family. Between August 1914 and July 1918, more than 13 million men served in the German army. Nearly 20 percent of the total [End Page 21] population and 85 percent of all eligible men mobilized to fight. Since the rupture of war coincided with the unprecedented engagement of millions of actual individuals, the crisis had a remarkable autobiographical aspect. Germans from all walks of life knew relatives on the front and told tales about fighting the war, procuring food and laboring in wartime factories. The war thus vastly expanded the people's archive.

Although the German government produced thousands of war-related texts and histories, these cannot compare to the millions of letters, poems and newspaper articles written and consumed in domestic settings. All sorts of documents revealed this personal engagement. During the war, newspapers published hundreds of unsolicited poems every day; by one estimate fifty thousand German war poems were written on each day of August 1914. 12 Families pasted scrapbooks and ordinary soldiers kept diaries and sent millions of letters home every day. Some 29 billion pieces of mail were sent back and forth between the battlefront and the home front in the four years that followed mobilization: every day some ten million letters, postcards, telegrams and packages reached the front, and every day nearly seven million were sent back home. 13 Although the political valence of this correspondence is unclear, given ordinary literary conventions, the increasingly centralized management of news, and military censorship, it is clear that contemporaries prized their own vernacular knowledge of the war. By the end of the war, over 97 separate editions of war letters had been assembled, published and purchased, the most famous of which was Philipp Witkop's 1916 Kriegsbriefe deutscher Studenten.

14 The high command acknowledged the power of these completely ordinary, unauthoritative letters by incorporating them into the patriotic "enlightenment" the troops received in the last two years of the war. 15 What all this suggests is the degree to which the war was regarded as a distinctively people's war. It was legitimated in the name of the people rather than the state or the monarchy, and it dramatized as never before the involvement of individuals in the larger movements of history. Archivists themselves recognized the importance of documenting popular sovereignty and called on citizens to preserve and turn over letters and other reports on the war. 16 Total war thus prompted an expansion of what constituted compelling historical evidence and reoriented the history of the war into social-historical streams. [End Page 22] It was on the basis of individual experience that Germans disputed among themselves the meaning of the war. Although the published editions of war letters retained a generally patriotic tone, private correspondence to pastors, mayors and Reichstag deputies told other stories about injustices on the front and urged alternative courses of action.

17 And after the war, citizens returned again and again to the archives they had assembled in order to support their claims about the course of the war, the reasons for military defeat, and the justice of the November Revolution. Partisan newspapers on the left and the right were filled with recollections of frontline service, and recriminations forth and back were played out again when the flood of semi-autobiographical war novels commenced in the late 1920s. 18 Indeed, one of the most compelling wartime diaries, written by seaman Richard Stumpf and documenting the harsh discipline of naval authorities, was submitted as evidence in 1926 to a Reichstag commission examining the origins of the revolution and later published in polemical form. 19 No other war had been depicted in this unmanaged, democratic way. The great consequence of World War I was the emergence of popular sovereignty as the organizing principle of German politics and thus the basis for the reorganization of the German archive. While Germans certainly did not agree on political questions or on the origins or outcome of the war, they justified their actions and expectations in terms of the nation and the people's community that the war had brought into view.

As a result, excerpts from the people's archive gained unprecedented political value: Witkop's edition of war letters is the primary example. At the same time, Germany's defeat and the convulsions of the revolution threw open questions of political liability. Did Germany's government mishandle foreign affairs before 1914? Did socialists at home betray the army in the field? And what burden of responsibility did the military bear for the outbreak of the revolution? It was the sorry fate of the postwar nation that authorized enormous historical projects in the form of parliamentary commissions and protracted libel cases around the "stab-in-the-back" legend. The result was a massive reconstitution of the official archive in the public sphere, which signaled the unresolved nature of Germany's historical itinerary even if massive editions such as the sixty-volume Die grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette 1871–1914, overseen by the "Central Office to Investigate the Causes of the War" in the Foreign Ministry, claimed to offer definitive statements about Germany's guiltlessness.

[End Page 23] The importance of making the case for Germany, for both domestic and international publics and by both critics and apologists of the Kaiserreich, prompted the establishment of a central archive, the Reichsarchiv, in 1919. As a central repository of German history, it was charged with documenting and preserving the national heritage of Germans in the wake of the nation's defeat. "Wars trigger archives"; they did so in 1806 and again in 1918. 20 Housed in a former military school on the Brauhausberg in Potsdam and largely staffed by decommissioned officers, the Reichs-archiv was central to the effort to justify Germany's national cause. That it opened its doors to the public and initiated the collection of war letters and other documents of the people's struggle in the war, however, indicated that sovereignty had shifted from state to nation, and it thus enabled the production of alternative histories. But for the most part the Reichsarchiv served as the point of verification for Germany's national ordeal and for its refurbished future.

21 As Bernd Faulenbach explains for the 1920s, "a flood of historical publications engaged contemporary themes. A significant part of the work capacity of modern historians was absorbed in writing the 'prehistory to the present,' whereby the experience of the war and its resolution was the primary motivation." 22 Most of this historiography was nationalist and conventional, but it was supported by exhaustive and unprecedented archival research. The same empiricial foundation characterized as well the few historians such as Veit Valentin and Eckart Kehr who struggled to expose the authoritarian structure of the prewar German state. Entangled as they had become in German history, historians in Great Britain, France and the United States vigorously joined the debate about the origins of World War I (Bernadotte Schmitt and Sidney Fay are the key figures). 23 This entanglement was, of course, far greater after World War II, by which time it was impossible to write German history without non-German historians. Ultimately, the huge inflation of archival sources and archival documentation corresponded to a deflation in archival authority and to the revival of historical hermeneutics.

The shift from an emphasis on state to one on nation was the consequence of Germany's total mobilization effort during the war. But military defeat left the German subject undefined. Weimar culture added to a relentless attempt to survey, inventory and describe in order to revisualize the nation as an active, even triumphant, political player in the future. This [End Page 24] required a dramatic expansion of the archive. Historians and sociologists initiated comprehensive ethnographic surveys to establish the durability of German ethnic identity. Historians focused less on the achievement of German unification, as they had in the years before 1914, and more on the long-term and continuing struggle of the German people in Europe. They operated in the subjunctive mode and put accent on what remained incomplete and broken. 24 Along the edges of the profession, younger historians pursued more energetically the attempt to write a deliberately new kind of history of the German people. In particular, they looked to the border regions, which were not only imperiled by the postwar settlement but had been neglected in the Second Reich. It was here that historians believed they had found the site of a pure, besieged Germandom.

"The variety of German settlements in east-central Europe and even overseas," writes Willi Oberkrom about these social-historical studies, "seemed to hold the 'magical key' to the recognition of 'our' ethnic identity." A closer examination of "settlement patterns, house types ... traditions and customs, clothing and food" promised to inventory "common generalities and regional particularities" and thereby uncover a "genuine folk life." Increasingly, "Volk was perceived as the constituent element and subject of social-historical evolution." 25 In an almost obsessive practice of self-observation, Germans scanned the resources of the country and the make-up of the population, building a cultural archive of items and types adequate to mastering the "altered world" of international instability and technological innovation. It was almost a game to identify the nation's new resources.

Germany's largest newsweekly, Ullstein's Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, introduced to the nation its "New Age Types": "the traffic policeman," "the radio operator," "the soundman," "the woman doctor," "the sports announcer," "the race car driver," "the driving instructor" and "the Alpine skier," all new-fangled experts of one sort or another. 26 Weimar culture produced dozens of physiognomic surveys such as this one, each one surveying and taking measure of the new face (Antlitz, a characteristic Weimar-era word) of the postwar world. Photographers such as Erich Retzlaff, Erna Lendvai-Dircksen and August Sander scrutinized the faces and bodies of Germans to build galleries of strength, solidity and rootedness at the level of the ordinary existence. 27 [End Page 25] Cultural activity in the Weimar years developed as an effort to identify the human types and biological and technological forces that would equip the regenerate nation. It constituted nothing less than an ever-expanding archive of German capacity.

However, the instrumentalization of the archive in the first years after 1918 was not systematic and lacked political direction, despite its nationalist tendency and military accent. After 1933, with the National Socialist seizure of power, the archive assumed a much larger role in German political life. The Racial Archive For the Nazis to realize their aim of reconstituting the German public as a self-consciously biological body politic, they had to be able to distinguish Jews from Germans and unhealthy elements from healthy ones, and they had to discipline Germans to conduct their lives according to new biological standards. This required not only the mobilization of existing records for political ends but the creation of new records that would recognize the biological categories the Nazis held to be so consequential. As the definitions of the political became more biological so did the official archive.

Josef Franz Knöpfler, director of the Bavarian archival administration, stated the enhanced function of the archive in the National Socialist state quite clearly in 1936: "There is no practice of racial politics without the mobilization of source documents, which indicate the origin and development of a race and people.… There is no racial politics without archives, without archivists." 28 The first major step in the process of racial documentation were directives that beginning in 1933 instructed local health offices to identify those citizens who were deemed to be biologically unhealthy. These became ever more detailed and intrusive and provided the basis for the sterilization campaign that identified as many as one million Germans as biologically degenerate—a fifth of these were actually sterilized. 29 The second step was taken with the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, which redefined German citizenry and excluded Jews from public life. But a comprehensive archive of who was German and who was not was only established with the census of May 1939.

[End Page 26] Conducted on 17 May 1939, after having been postponed for one year to include Austria, the national census established a relatively accurate count of who was Aryan and who was Jewish. It counted a total of 233,973 so-called racial Jews within the borders of 1939. A much more detailed survey took place on 13 August 1939, and it was the data it produced that was stored on punch cards for subsequent retrieval. (IBM's German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, produced as many as 1.5 billion punch cards a year to sort and resort Germany's population.) 30 Although the data was never reassembled on the national level, it was stored in local and regional card catalogs, or Volkskarteien, which allowed authorities to identify in the territory of their responsibility able-bodied workers, potential soldiers, and Jews.

Handed out one week by thousands of volunteers and collected the next, the Volkskartei compiled data in fourteen fields that corresponded to fourteen punch holes at the top margin of each card; these were later tabbed with different colors to simplify the process of assessment. All legal residents—Jews as well as non-Jews—filled out the cards, providing information on trade (field 2), physical impairments (field 4), education (field 6); ability to speak foreign languages or travel experience in a foreign country (field 7), other skills and expertise (field 8), and the ability to drive, ride and fly (field 9). It was no secret that this information was assembled in order to more perfectly mobilize Germans and make efficient use of their specific skills in the event of war. The types the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung had introduced to readers in its Weimar-era photo series, the Nazi census succeeded in identifying for political purposes across the entire population. Mobilization was also accompanied by exclusion, or purification as the Nazis saw it: in the last field, field 14, authorities marked whether residents were Jewish; a black tab over the fourteenth punch hole designated the cardholder as Jewish.

It was on the basis of these catalogs that local authorities identified and gathered up German Jews for deportation after 1941; all they had to do was pull the cards with the black tab on the last field. 31 Although not accessible from a single point, the Volkskartei very nearly realized the goal of a systematic ethnographic and racial archive. The Nazis also racialized vernacular archives since they obligated individual Germans to maintain extensive racial archives about their bodies, lives and families. The biological politics of the regime did not simply posit the applicability of new physiognomic categories of race and health [End Page 27] but demanded that citizens strive to match their lives to those categories. "It is not a party badge or a brown shirt that makes you a National Socialist, but rather your character and the conduct of your life," announced one leading National Socialist health official in July 1933. 32 A "spiritual revolution" had to follow the accomplishments of the political revolution, insisted Walter Gross, director of the Rassenpolitisches Amt of the Nazi Party, a year later: we will "fundamentally remodel and reform"—"even all those things that seem today completely solid," he added.

33 What was necessary was to "recognize yourself" (Erkenne dich selbst), which meant following the tenets of hereditary biology to find a suitable partner for marriage and marry only for love, to provide the Volk with healthy children, and to accept "the limits of empathy" as a revitalized Germany weeded out racial undesirables. 34 The task was to make Germans into Aryans. Not only would the Aryan body have to be protected through vigorous eugenic measures but the Aryan self had to be implemented by the individual's responsibility to the collective racial whole. This put the emphasis on the efforts of ordinary, racially desirable Germans to discipline themselves in order to conduct their lives in accordance with the precepts of the racial future. The most important papers in the expanded archive of domestic life in the Third Reich were those that documented Aryan identity. With the publication of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, the racial distinction between German (or Aryan) and Jew governed the most important aspects of everyday life, particularly the permission to marry and the registration of births and deaths.

Just how willingly the transformation of Germans into Aryans and Jews was accepted is not clear, but the categories worked their way into everyday life. Victor Klemperer, for example, was astonished to hear even non-Nazi acquaintances talk about Sippe or genealogical kin. 35 Since vigorous public interest in genealogy went hand-in-hand with legal requirements to prepare an Ahnenpass, or genealogical passport, there seems to have been broad legitimacy to the idea of kin and thus the idea of racial insiders and outsiders. Most contemporaries were familiar with a "family tree," in which relatives are organized from the oldest ancestors down several generations to the numerous family clusters of the living generation. But the table of ancestors that Germans had to include in their racial passports worked quite differently, from the contemporary individual backward to include all blood relatives in an inverted pyramid.

[End Page 28] "If the family tree is colorful and many-sided, depending on the number of children and the structure of the family," one genealogical expert commented, the table of ancestors "has an architectonic layout characterized by strict discrimination and mathematical uniformity." Beginning with the individual in question, it "reveals the direction of maternal and paternal bloodlines" in order to serve as a certification of blood purity and thus the inclusion of the individual in the "Volksgemeinschaft." 36 The effort at certification was no easy task. Germans needed the "nose of an accomplished detective" in order to gather up all the data to track bloodlines into the past. "State archives and libraries have to be trawled ... and also ranking lists, muster roles, telephone books, bills of lading, guild records.

We also have to make our way to old cemeteries where tumble-down graves might reveal yet another clue." 37 ("Tumble-down graves"—there is an uneasy resemblance between the effort to document Aryan identity before 1945 and the recovery of traces of Jewish life in Germany and Poland after 1945.) Beginning in 1936, anyone getting married assumed an "Aryan" identity. Prospective husbands and wives needed to document their Aryan racial status with notarized citations of the registrations of the birth, marriage and death of each of their parents and grandparents. Moreover, prospective newlyweds had to certify their genetic health, which, if local authorities believed it necessary, meant a visit to the local public health office and the acquisition of additional documents. (The law requiring such visits was drawn up, but suspended in practice.) In addition to handing out Mein Kampf, the registrar's office provided couples with pamphlets on maintaining and reproducing good racial stock—Deutscher, denk an deine und deiner Kinder Gesundheit, Handbuch für die deutsche Familie and Ratgeber für Mütter—and instructions on how to maintain proper genealogical records.

38 This constituted a broad effort to push Germans to document and comport themselves as Aryans. Piece by piece, ordinary Germans assembled their own private archives, and as they did they invariably became more recognizable as Aryans in Hitler's eyes and in their own. Like the pre-formatted albums in which contemporaries during World War I pasted letters and photographs under patriotic and other sentimental headings, the racial passport or Ahnenpass was the axis around which the people's archive proliferated in the 1940s. For individuals to acquire the [End Page 29] necessary passport entailed the reorganization and systemization of old family records that were lying around as well as the procurement of new documents, some going back to the early nineteenth century. A cardboard box in Berlin's Landesarchiv contains old Ahnenpässe.

Many were in fact mass-produced by the Verlag für Stammbaumwesen and included in the back matter a handy "Reichsalphabet der Familie," a list of permissible names for children, divided into recommended Germanic names from Adalbert to Wulf, for men, and Ada to Wunhild, for women, and acceptable non-Germanic names (Achim to Vinzent for men, Agathe to Viktoria for women), as well as the ubiquitous "Law for the Protection of German Blood" of 15 September 1935. New papers gathered inside the pages of the Ahnenpass: the mandated Arbeitsbuch; a four-leaf clover; a restaurant bill; a marriage certificate; birth announcements of children; baptismal certificates; innoculation records; divorce papers; insurance cards; Winter Aid stamps; and also correspondence with a son serving on the front; official confirmation of a soldier missing in action; a letter from a fallen man's comrade describing the whereabouts of the dead man's grave "in Aleksandrowka (village center) ... some 16 km. south of Olenin which is some 60 km.

west of Rshew"; a 1945 "welfare card for bomb victims" (on which was also handwritten "refugees from the East"). 39 Family archives, racial categories and individual identities became increasingly calibrated with one another. For German Jews, however, the process of archiving ran in reverse. Jews and so-called "racial Jews," converts to Christianity, were required to register themselves as Jewish with local authorities and to carry identification papers which labeled them as such. But otherwise, the paperwork they filled out at the command of the National Socialist regime was a prelude to the destruction of their private property and ultimately to their murder. In Dresden, Victor Klemperer spent the morning of Wednesday, 29 June 1938, "filling out forms: Inventory of Assets of Jews." An inventory of "household assets" followed in December 1941. Since "a house search can be expected immediately after the inventory statement," Klemperer resolved to part with his manuscripts and his diary, which his wife stowed with friends; thereafter, the additional entries that Klemperer made had to be secreted out of his rooms in small packets.

As it was, the ability to maintain a private archive was already severely hampered by the shortage of paper and the prohibition on Jews from possessing typewriters. Since [End Page 30] the concentration of Jews in "Jew houses" usually preceded the outright evacuation of German Jews, Klemperer, like so many others, was forced to move into drastically smaller quarters, which meant the disposal of books and papers. "[I] am virtually ravaging my past," he wrote in his diary on 21 May 1941. "The principal activity" of the next day was "burning, burning, burning for hours on end: heaps of letters, manuscripts." Letters were still received: "today," wrote Klemperer on 7 December 1941, "I saw a postcard with the postmark: 'Litzmanndstadt Ghetto'... The card bore yet another stamp: 'Litzmannstadt, biggest industrial city of the East," Klemperer added. 40 But soon that correspondence came to an end as well. Incidentally, Jews had been prohibited from using German archives since 1938.

The racial archive reflected the ambitious efforts of the Nazis to shape a new collective subject; it at once required substantial self-archiving and recontextualization on the part of racial insiders and rested on the step-by-step exclusion and decontextualization of racial outsiders. It came with extraordinary systemization of provenience in order to manufacture a collective, Aryan subject in such a way that the possession of the archive itself became the arbiter of historical existence. Archives of Loss The burning of his personal archive that Klemperer undertook in May 1941 indicates an entirely new dimension to modern archival practice. Even the vernacular archive had become dangerous, and its carefree maintenance impossible, in conditions in which the Nazis sought to revisualize, reclassify and reorder the world. Klemperer's activity on that spring day reproduced in miniature the immense reconfiguration of the German archive in the twentieth century.

His arson followed the demolition of countless politically risky archives already in 1933, when left-wing politicians and intellectuals burnt or otherwise disposed of their papers, a conflagration which the Nazis themselves fueled in their own book-burnings that they sponsored across Germany beginning in May 1933 and the ransacking of the files of countless civic groups and trade unions. 41 The holdings of some libraries actually diminished over the course of the 1930s. The emigration of German Jews entailed as well the dispersion and loss of personal papers, [End Page 31] libraries, heirlooms, photographs and other family memorabilia. Hundreds of synagogues were burned down in November 1938 and with them the evidence of Jewish life in Germany over the course of many centuries, a prelude to the willful destruction of the life and property of Jewish communities across Europe after 1939. German history came to the rest of Europe in the form of terrifying annihilation. Klemperer's arson of May 1941 also anticipated the destruction that came with the end of the war. Much of the material evidence of Nazism's domestic setting was deliberately destroyed.

"When you have two military brothers and a like-minded brother-in-law, you can image what sort of stuff has collected around the house," wrote one woman in besieged Gleiwitz in late January 1945 as she tore up incriminating photographs before the arrival of the Russians. 42 The writer Günter Kunert remembers the same thing as a child in Prenzlauer Berg, his Berlin neighborhood. He recounted what happened when word spread that the Russians were about to arrive: "Turmoil ensued—papers are taken out, documents, passports, photographs, any indication of one's own complicity ... straight into the fires of purgatory with all that incriminating material." 43 These private acts of destruction, and the absence to this day of a cluttered domestic archive of the years 1933–45, provide an indication of the entanglement of individuals in the racial categories of Nazism.

(In contrast to this destruction was the rapid production of new archives after the war—stories of communist relatives, assistance to Jewish colleagues, Persilscheine, and other anti-Nazi bonafides.) 44 The actions of getting rid of the evidence of collaboration were compounded by the furious end of the war in Germany, the expulsion of twelve million Germans from eastern Europe, the bombardment of German cities and thus the ruin of countless households. In his poem "Autumn 1944," Hans Magnus Enzenberger remembered watching Allied bombers fly toward his hometown of Nuremberg and imagining the remnants of what amounted to his family's archive in the attic catching fire: to him lying in the grass they appeared magnificent, shimmering high up in the wide open October sky, these streams of bombers, and no great loss the souvenirs burning far away in the musty attic: [End Page 32] collector's teacups and angel's hair, grandfather's Parisian postcards (Oh là là!) and his belt buckle from another war, petticoats full of holes, medals, doll houses, a plaster model of Psyche and in a cigar box some forgotten tickets to a shrine— but in the basement the corpses are still there.

45 I do not cite Enzenberger's poem in order to dramatize the poignancy of the material losses of Germans in Nuremberg or elsewhere, but to indicate the radical discontinuity that past things came to stand for after the mobilizations of total war. Like the photographs, domestic artifacts and old-fashioned interiors in W. G. Sebald's fiction, the material remnants of the 1920s and 1930s came to signify the broken nature of historical connections across the divides of the twentieth century. 46 However, the destruction of sensible connections with the past was not primarily the function of the material devastation of the war or even of the physical homelessness of millions of Germans in 1945. It was the result of the total seizure of German history by the National Socialists. The jumble in the German attic had been ever more deliberately organized and classified during the Third Reich so that the German past was transformed more and more into the specific prehistory of National Socialism: the messy family tree made way for the uniform table of ancestors. What did not fit in was thrown away.

Indeed it is telling that with the onset of air raids after 1942 the Nazis had ordered the "Entrumpelung" or uncluttering of attic spaces. This precautionary measure against incendiary bombs thus led to the disposal of the junk that people had kept around them. By 1945, the loose ends of history had been largely cut off. What remained were artifacts that all too unambiguously designated National Socialism as the embodiment of German history, and these were both dangerous and useless with the end of the Third Reich. For this reason, traces of the domestic interior of the years 1933–45 have almost completely disappeared. Much of the past was simply jettisoned. "One bucket, one lampshade, a blue enamel bowl, 1 tall glass vase, and a picture in a [End Page 33] gilded frame"—the artist Eva Richter-Fritzsche watched an old man haul a few possessions into the Berlin subway in January 1945: "It is hard to believe," she commented, "that we are still able to haul all things along with us.

But actually one throws away too much ballast—anything not to endanger the momentum, the new start." 47 Getting rid of the debris of the past was politically expedient, but it was more than that; it was a recognition that the archive had lost its pell-mell or happenstance quality and its multivocal registers. It was the imbrication of Germany's historical continuity and its political catastrophe that made so dramatic the break represented by 1945, which separated a cluttered but difficult past from an empty, directionless present. For contemporaries, 1945 was most readily described as collapse ("Zusammenbruch") or catastrophe. 48 With the "catastrophe" of 1945 Germany's archival fever had come to an end. National archives were reestablished in Potsdam in 1946 and, with the division of Germany, in Bonn in 1952, but the effort to distinguish a common German past as the marker of German identity proved increasingly unpersuasive. Of course, the Federal Republic oversaw attempts to reconstitute the German archive as a record of German loss and German victimization.

In the 1950s, the West German government sponsored a massive Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, which gathered up hundreds of eyewitness accounts and cited a growing memoir literature. A large vernacular literature also chronicled the destruction of German towns and cities and the suffering of German soldiers in the east. 49 But while these accounts more or less adequately fashioned a collective subject in the form of the German victim, they did not provide a usable history and ultimately sharpened the evidence of loss and temporal discontinuity. The increasingly energetic effort to come to terms with the Nazi past had the same effect. While postwar archives and scholarly institutes promoted an understanding of Nazism, and its origins in the sweep of German history, they also marked off the past from the present and thereby dramatized the new beginnings of 1945 and then of 1968 and 1989 rather than historical connections. The sense of a new beginning persistently overshadowed the work of historical resolution. What sense of historical rootedness West Germans did feel was either local and thus politically indistinct or European and thus not specifically German.

Postwar history came to stress what Germans shared with other people rather than what made them distinct and therefore did not require [End Page 34] the provenience of the archive. A specifically German historical continuity meant less and less to a population that increasingly felt that the present was the best time in which to live. 50 Even as conservative intellectuals such as Hans Freyer and Helmut Schelsky in the 1950s or Botho Strauss in the 1990s mourned the diminished role of history in the formation of German subjectivity, they acknowledged that national identity in postwar Germany rested on accepting the incommensurate nature of prewar lives in postwar contexts. It was in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that the new start was promoted most relentlessly and most oppressively. The attempt to create a new socialist citizen came with all the regimentation of the dictatorship but also opened up new spaces, putting stress on the willingness to adapt in the name of the future rather than recollecting the specificities of political background.

This disregard for the personal histories of East Germany's citizens is startling; it stood in dramatic contrast to Stalinist Russia, where allegedly bourgeois pasts had continued to implicate and mortally endanger individuals throughout the 1930s and 1940s. 51 To cut off the dead hand of the past after 1945 had two critical implications for the status of the archive. On the one hand, the particular histories of collaboration, opportunism or, for that matter, resistance in the Third Reich were absorbed by the general momentum of forward movement toward socialism. "We do not require a negative certification for not having been compromised, for having been neutral," party officials insisted, "but rather positive evidence of cooperation" now. Most of the population in East Germany could thereby acquire vague antifascist attitudes without providing the evidence of specific antifascist activities. 52 The particulars of antifascist resistance were not cultivated by a regime interested in creating a new socialist unity.

It is telling that the East German state literally divested its citizens of their history, expropriating the memorabilia of Wilhlemine and Weimar-era political struggles by encouraging individuals to donate historical artifacts to East Berlin's Museum for German History; prohibiting sport clubs from maintaining their pre-1933 flags, banners and traditions; and marginalizing the testimony of surviving "old fighters." 53 Socialist unity in the East, much like the emerging democratic consensus in the West, had little use for reworking the political differences in the past. The traces of political trajectories disappeared in order to produce a generalized [End Page 35] antifascist consensus. The result was the characteristic "eventlessness" (Ereignislosigkeit) of the GDR. 54 On the other hand, the GDR strenuously monitored the political education of its citizens, creating a massive archive in the form of internal state security or Stasi files. By the end of the 1980s over 100,000 official Stasi agents and nearly twice as many unofficial collaborators reported on the extent to which the East German population lived up to the standards of a new, postwar socialist citizenship.

Set against internal government documents, which were saturated with the monotonal ideological language of the Socialist Unity Party and even at the highest levels could hardly be distinguished from published propaganda in the official newspaper, Neues Deutschland, the Stasi archives provide an extremely textured documentation of everyday life in East Germany. In order to report on dissent, on contacts with the West and contamination by nonsocialist media, the Stasi infiltrated the most intimate, domestic spheres. It thereby enforced political compliance but also left an extraordinary record of ordinary conversations, daily rhythms and household arrangements. The reach of the Stasi was certainly oppressive; nowhere in the Eastern Bloc were internal security agents so densely settled as in the GDR in the 1980s. No wonder citizens felt their presence like "a scratchy undershirt." 55 But Stasi attention to private spaces was also an acknowledgment that homes were not only one of the few spaces where antigovernment opinion could congeal but the particular sites where the regime could gain legitimacy by providing adequate housing, consumer goods and the promise of relaxation. Party officials spent an inordinate amount of time trying to realize a socialist standard of living.

The agenda of high-level meetings, comments Thomas Lindenberger, often resembled nothing so much as a "catalog to an exhibit on the history of everyday life. That is how thoroughly they up there cared about everything that happened down there." 56 So important was success on this domestic terrain that citizens themselves were encouraged by the Ulbricht regime after 1961 to inform authorities about substandard products and services. This information produced a huge archive from below as ordinary East Germans passed along Eingaben or complaints to local and party authorities, to shop-floor work brigades and to media outlets. 57 By the end of the 1980s over one million petitions were being written annually, mostly about the housing crisis and meager travel opportunities. One estimate concludes [End Page 36] that nearly one in every two adults in East Germany wrote at least one petition each year. 58 While this ventilation of ordinary problems ended by channeling and depoliticizing criticism of the regime, it also indicated the degree to which citizens actively participated in the common cause of making a more just society. The Eingaben revealed just how much East Germans argued in terms of an ideal socialist society and thereby insinuated themselves in the effort.

In this regard, the regime's aims to create a new morality were largely realized. The archive of everyday complaint had a further effect: it demonstrated how important the social and cultural role of the home had become in the years before 1989 and set the stage for the widespread nostalgia for those niches and the consumer products that came with them once the GDR disappeared. Both the racial archive in the Third Reich and the Stasi archive in the GDR were founded on the attempt to create new kinds of citizens and to undo the disunities of the past. And both projects of classification invited citizens to recast their own lives in politically appropriate ways. But the differences are also fundamental. The racial archive aimed at the destruction of non-Aryans, while the Stasi archive was at once less dangerous to and more intrusive for the majority population. The sheer scale of Stasi espionage is extraordinary: more than one in every five, mostly male adults in East Germany had links to the Stasi and many more were monitored so that by the end of 1996 more than one million Germans had asked to review their files.

59 Ultimately, Nazi Germany rested on broader popular support, circumstances which demanded less intense monitorship of the population but also invited more energetic archiving of the self. What remains in the aftermath of both dictatorships is the messy evidence of the imbrication of individuals in larger political projects, a mix of opportunism, regret and idealism. The desire to make the personal realm political mingles with efforts of even true believers to shield themselves and their families from complete political subordination. The legitimacy of the new future, whether it was the Nazi future of 1933, or the West German democratic future of 1949, or its East German socialist counterpart, quite successfully wiped away much of the old future it had superseded. Monika Maron, for example, describes German history in the twentieth century as a series of conversions, which repeatedly displaced the evidence of former lives. She admits her astonishment at how quickly her family had forgotten about the Jewish origins of the family in Poland [End Page 37] at the turn of the century, the heartbreaking letters to deported grandparents in the years 1939–42 and, more generally, the grinding poverty of tenement life in pre-1933 Berlin.

60 One of the dramatic things about recent German history is that it has repeatedly offered individuals opportunities for reinvention: as racial insiders in 1933 and as new democrats or socialists after 1945. The accent always fell on discontinuity rather than continuity. That reinvention meant acquiring new identities had the effect of both plundering and refashioning archives so that only traces of the repressed past remained. But these traces spoke with greater eloquence as one turning point gave way to another and the process of remembering increasingly meant reconstructing the process of forgetting and accounting the record of loss. A new archive has emerged in the last two decades. On the vernacular level, it is based on the knowledge that the successive lives that Germans have made in the twentieth century were based on the extraordinary selectivity of remembrance. Memoirs and other autobiographical texts endeavor to reconstruct what had not been told, what did not get remembered. Thus authors such as Monika Maron, Wibke Bruhns, Stefan Wackwitz and Uwe Timm reconstruct past family histories on the basis of traces, misplaced photographs, diaries and letters—Pawels Briefe.

61 The careful reconstructions of time and place in the recent memoir literature reveal not simply the objects stranded across the twentieth century but the selectivity of prior recollection that kept those objects out of view for so long. They plainly reveal the storiedness of autobiography and make use of the traces of other pasts that have survived to yield new evidence in the present. The story they tell is one of massive displacement. This sense of loss is also apparent at the national level. The German archive can no longer encompass the history of all the new Germanies. Its holdings cannot provide the answers to the questions about complicity, survival and murder or even provide a record of loss. The Bundesarchiv is hardly the only site where it is possible or necessary to research German history. German history no longer belongs to Germans alone: among the most moving Holocaust memoirs, for example, are those written by a Pole, an Italian and a Spaniard. Historians of Germany must move beyond Germany to begin to account for its history: to the places to which European Jews fled while it was still possible, including the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the National Archives in Washington, DC.

[End Page 38] The forcible dispersion of European Jews and other refugees produced an archive of exile which encompasses semi-official papers of institutions such as the American Friends Service Committee, the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, the American Jewish Archives and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; private efforts at documentation from the autobiographies deposited already in the 1930s at Harvard University to the oral interviews of the Yale Holocaust project; and most impressively, thousands upon thousands of memoirs, autobiographies, and other recollections of displacement passed on from generation to generation. 62 The global displacements of the Holocaust have created a massive archive of survivor accounts that is without precedent. The point of origin of this last archive is discontinuity, which makes special demands on its users. It is plural, rather than authoritative; manifestly incomplete, rather than comprehensive; global, rather than local. This archive of loss thereby subverts the state-centered authority of the conventional archive. To even begin to adequately understand the history of exile and mass death in twentieth-century Germany, and to write against the idea of a common past, the historian needs to write narratives from a variety of perspectives and adopt techniques of intertextuality.

At the same time, the histories of Germany are marked with a lingering deficit: the final impossibility of completely understanding or fully accounting for the loss. The great burden of German history is to recognize that the archive in Germany is broken; to use it as if it were not would be to reproduce the excisions of the past. At the same time, the great opportunity of German history is to take the broken, dispersed archive of the twentieth century as a means to reflect on the storiedness of history, its exclusions and repressions, and its means of self-representation, and to reconsider the displacements of life and death in the past. In the end, the German archive provides evidence for both the absence of a common past and the enormous violence entailed in the attempts to produce it.

Question: Langlauf (literally 'long-term' in German) refers to an endurance form of which sport?
Answer: Skiing