What is an Archive?

(NOTE: before you read this, there's something you should know. When I make posts, it is my intention to equip them with pictures. Now, the pictures may seem random. But every post where there are pictures, there will be a theme behind all of the pictures. The theme relates to the topic of the post in a direct, symbolic,  metaphorical or purely irrational way.  If you are reading this, I challenge you to try to answer two questions in the comments: a.) what you think the theme of the pictures is; and b.) how that theme relates to the topic of the post. Whoever gets the right answer first will win.)

It’s a simple question, really. A look-up-in-the-dictionary-able answer. After all, I’ve been to archives, I know what they look like on the inside, I even know what they generally smell like.  For some unfathomable reason, however, whenever this question was posed to me in the weeks leading up to my research trip, I found myself bumbling around like a third grader who was called out of her daydreaming by teacher to answer the math problem in the book.

Now that I am here in Germany, getting settled and planning my research strategy, I’m ruminating upon the subject of archives and why they are so difficult to explain. I mean, they aren’t easy to understand—even as historians. Thinking too hard about what an archive is or isn’t is a little bit like saying the same word over and over until you wonder whether it is a word at all.

Archive. Archive. Archive. Archive.

See?

Treasure Trove of books at the HAB.

(I am not allowed to take pictures of the archive, so I have included pictures from websites for some of these. All of the ones that are not hyper linked are my own.)

By coincidence, the Herzog AugustBibliothek  [i] here in Wolfenbüttel was the first archive I ever visited. It was four years ago, before I had even decided I wanted to become a historian, let alone started my training as one. I was in Germany for the end of the summer, and decided to stop in and visit K., another graduate student from my university in Cincinnat. K. was becoming a historian.

At one point, she asked if I wanted to see the archive. As we walked into the garderobe, there were important-looking signs all over that were chock full of the word “verboten!” (forbidden). Pens. Cameras. Cell phones (cell phones have cameras. Now they are allowed but at the time, they weren’t.) I seem to recall one rule which instructed users how to breathe properly, so that no miniscule water-condensation got on the sources—I know I’ve seen that one somewhere.

There was a random door in the Garerobe. “Is that were the UN Security Council meets?” I asked K.

“No, I think that’s another door to where the archivists are,” she explained. Oh.

I don’t remember much, except when Kelly showed me one of the sources she was working with, a 16^th-century calendar. We wore white gloves. The entire reading room, though filled with other scholars, was quiet as they worked.

“But this is a facsimile, right?” I asked Kelly. “I mean, they can’t really keep books and stuff preserved for that long.”

She shook her head and explained that the HAB had sources that were from the twelfth or thirteenth century, possibly even older but she wasn’t sure.

Within only a few months, I was starting to work towards entering a History program for my PhD.

I call these "Love Lox." There is a bridge I cross each day on my way to the HAB, and the posts are adorned with chains full of padlocks. It is beautiful--the locks are all different colors and the horizontal railings above them have flower boxes full of blooming marigolds and other flowers. I finally took a closer look and realized that each lock has the name of a couple engraved into it--sort of like carving the initials of your beloved into a tree. Don't miss the ducks in the river! :)

When one gets to using the word “archive” in everyday speech, it seems like people don’t quite understand the word. They appear to grow wide eyed and fearful, as though I am discussing an exotic species of buildings rarely seen in the wild. In reality, however, the jungle of our society is pocketed with nooks and crannies wherein lie our overgrown repositories of the past. Many large companies and firms have rooms set aside for the archiving of past correspondences, contracts, budgets, employee records, and items of a similar nature. The same is true for hospitals, schools, churches, synagogues, libraries and public venues like opera houses and theaters. These rooms or wings or even entire buildings are hardly marked for public passersby, because records by their very nature are supposed to be private—but, I assure you, they are there. In fact, there could be an archive behind that door. Or that one. Or even that one over there. Not this one, here, though—that’s where the Security Council meets. I advise always being on one’s guard—one can never be too careful in a world full of archives.

"A bookworm at work."

One of my tasks my first day actually working this week was attending what I thought was a mandatory lecture. Turns out, it was not mandatory at all, and was actually for the resident curators rather than for the guest historians and scholars. Imagine my chagrin upon hearing the title: “Dirty or Clean: Questions in Preservation Science.”  I reminded my jet lagged self not to groan audibly.

Lo and behold, it was an extremely fascinating lecture given by a spritely preservationist from Vienna, about my age. Her main point was that old documents are dirty, but when is it ethical to remove dirt in preserving documents? It used to be that preservationists were taught to get documents as clean as possible. Now, though, new ideas have come into the field which recognize that dirt can actually serve a purpose and in many cases should not be removed. Sometimes cleaning documents, for example, actually makes them cleaner and whiter than they would have been in the first place. Other times, cleaning them removes a microscopic layer off the top of the paper and ink. Both of these options destroys the integrity of the document, that is, the closeness they bear to their original forms once upon a time. Still other times, dirt actually gives us more information about the document itself. Dirt or earth trapped between pages can now be tested biologically and in some cases, help scientists determine whence the document originated. Wax from ecclesiastical candles dripped onto documents helps us understand how documents have been read in the intervening centuries.

In a related way, however, dirt can actually help preserve a document. Dirt—from fingerprints, soil or dust—over time fills in the microscopic cracks and ridges on the surface of the paper. Removing it re-exposes that rough surface to the air in the same way that removing trees from a field leaves the field open to wind. The wind over time will lead to soil erosion. A certain amount of dirt actually keeps the paper intact.

When you think about it, it is our dirt, the dirt of the present, that keeps the past intact. And arguably, it is also the past’s pull on us that keeps us intact. We keep tugging on each other, interacting with each other, the past and the present—we save one another from obsoleteness, erosion and or being bleached of true identity.

The a randomly beautiful window of a house I also walk past, near the love locks bridge.

If you look up “archive” in a dictionary, the definition will likely refer to three elements: documents, government, and a place of storage. One is apt to conclude that an archive is a place where public documents are stored. Simple enough, right?

Not quite. We are not just talking about any old documents, but particularly past documents. Documents are from the past when they have ceased to be necessary for current use or potential use in the future.  This is a tricky point:  any document is technically a record of something that happened in the past, right? I mean, unless the iPad comes out with an app that lets you write documents of the future.

Archives are our labratories in which we test the voices of the past, they are our hospitals in which we take care of the past, they are our studios where we come the closest we can get to what came before us. They are dusty (within two hours of working the first day, I had to run to the pharmacy across the street for some allergy medicine), they are hedged in with rules and gate-keeping, they are full of documents in Latin and other obscure languages… But, just think: at the Herzog August Bibliothek, for example, I can look at documents from the twelfth century if I so desire. Even if I understand nothing on the page, even if I am stifling sneezes, and even if I’m not allowed to take a pen anywhere on the premises: the hand which wrote that page belonged to another living, breathing human being nearly a millennium ago. It might not make for a sensationalist movie, but it at least makes for some pretty humbling moments. It also makes me value living in the present—trust me, penmanship has definitely improved since the middle ages.

The view outside my bedroom window. I think this is facing north.

In the broadest sense, we all leave the makings for an archive behind us when we die—or even in the process of living. Our lives, it could be argued, are living repositories.

I had to archive my room when I was packing to come here. I had to go through an amalgam of possessions to sort and decide what was necessary to bring, what was not. Then there was the cramming of these supposedly useful things into a suitcase.

When I arrived here, my first night, I opened that suitcase. There were layers of items packed in a tediously organized way: socks, running panths, a case of jewelry, some travel documents (why weren’t these on my carry on?), neatly folded pants (that had nonetheless become wrinkly)…

I had left the US with a suitcase full of things. I arrived in Germany with an archive of my life from back home.

What the dictionary doesn’t mention about archives is how chaotic they can be sometimes. To be honest, they are an absolute mess—not in the way that pigsties are, or dirty sinks, or muddy shoes. No, archives are messy in the way that life is, in the way that relationships are, in the way that crisscrossed footpaths leading up a mountain are sometimes too convoluted to map out.

My friend Rebecca, the Anglican who has cooked for me too many wonderful Swedish pancakes for me to conscionably continue teasing about the whole Henry VIII issue, has been spending a great deal of her weekends up north at her grandparent’s house these days. They are selling the big family house and opting for a smaller, more manageable place; Rebecca and her sisters are helping them clean and get rid of things.  It is an exhausting job, not just because her grandparents have accumulated a lot of possessions over the decades, but because the past is a sinuous and laborious organism: dismantling it is like trying to untangle a snarl in a 5-year-old tomboy’s hair.

“The other day, my sister and I were going through one of the upstairs closets full of old dress clothes to take to goodwill,” Rebecca told me one afternoon shortly before I left for Germany. “Clothes we have never seen before, because my grandparents stopped wearing them. We found out only later that, by accident, we had taken my dad’s only suit he owns to goodwill. He just happened to keep it in that closet, because it was a dressy outfit like the rest of my grandparent’s clothes in that closet.”

Rebecca tells me these stories, and she tells me about all the things in her grandparent’s basement and attic, all the things they have to go through and say good bye to. When she is cataloguing these memories aloud, she has a distant look in her eye as though she is walking through a museum for the last time. But, instead of a museum, all I can think is what an archive that house is. Unlike a museum, an archive is the raw, undigested material of the past. This raw material randomly collects together, like felled logs being sent down a river. As the past accumulates haphazardly, it remains in a perpetual state of sorting, ordering, gathering, piling, shelving, forgetting, dust collecting. There are shelves upon shelves upon storerooms upon vaults of historic material that have never yet been ascertained by professionals and most archives are like Rebecca’s grandparent’s house multiplied by an entire society.

If you ever get lost in a museum, just read the placard or listen to the audio tour you paid $5 extra for. In an archive, though, you’re not going to get an audio tour. In fact, you might get so lost in the closet full of clothes you never saw before, only to risk overlooking the one part of the story worth snatching up for future use.    

This is not from Wolfenbuettel. I took this picture last year in Nuremberg, when I was also researching. It was an exhibit of medieval astrolabes hanging on plexi glass with a large, open, sunlit area behind.

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[i] Technically, the Herzog August is classified as a library, not an archive. I still have not figured out the difference, but perhaps someday I will. As far as I can tell, they have the same types of rare and printed material that an archive has. I guess originally, you could check the rare books out. Nowadays, in order to use the rare books part of the library, you need to be registered with the library’s office of historical scientists (Geschichtswissenschaftler). This means a lot of things, one of which is that I get a really neat nametag to wear whenever I am working, which reads: “Nicole Marie Lyon, scientist” in German. Unfortunately I forgot my microscope and beakers in the states.