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• Warren Breckman

  Archiving the Future

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  Germany,

  literary criticism,

  Warren Breckman

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  I recently visited the German Literature Archive in Marbach, just outside Stuttgart. The modern concrete structure of the archive sits beside an older museum dedicated to Friedrich Schiller, the revered poet born in Marbach in 1759. Across the way is the Museum of Modern German Literature, a small architectural gem built a few years ago by David Chipperfield that somehow manages to be both monumental and understated. The complex sits atop the Schillerhöhe, a promontory overlooking a landscape where traces of the bucolic panorama that must have inspired the young poet vie with industrial smokestacks and the interweaving patterns of high voltage powerlines. I was there at the invitation of Ulrich Raulff, the archive’s director. Thus I was allowed to venture beyond the reading rooms and spend some hours in the archive’s vault. I’ve never considered myself an ‘archive rat’, that particular species of historian whose nose twitches in hungry anticipation at the first whiff of moldering paper. Yet it was impossible to resist the historian’s romance with the primary document down there, in that labyrinth which holds so much of the patrimony of modern German culture, in all its splendors and its abject depths. Martin Heidegger’s lecture notes, neatly arranged by the philosopher himself, overwritten with various colors of ink to signal ongoing revisions; the manuscript of The Metamorphosis written in Kafka’s crabbed hand; rows of papers from Arthur Schnitzler, the philosopher Gadamer, the historian Koselleck, and hundreds of other authors; David Friedrich Strauss’s notes from Hegel’s lectures, bursting with ideas on a Friday and then empty on Monday except for a cross etched by Strauss’s quill pen to mark the sudden death of Hegel over the weekend. And on every shelf, diaries and letters, traces of selves in their most intimate interior monologue and most varied dialogues with others. This is an archive dedicated not to the decisions of governments or the procedures of bureaucrats, but to creative lives at the intersection of private thought and public speech.

  Such an archive forcefully reminds me of the great gap that separates us from the practices of reflection and communication that prevailed even a couple of decades ago. What will the future archive documenting our present look like? What will it contain? Of course, the telephone, one of the modern world’s signature technologies, has been an enemy of the archive from the first moment someone decided to call rather than write. Yet the vast bulk of correspondence sitting in this archive suggests that the telephone in itself did not displace the letter. Throughout most of the twentieth century, and contrary to that marketing slogan that turned us into a culture of long-distance callers, when people wanted to "reach out and touch someone," they did so by passing a letter from one hand to another. Ironically, it may be that the production of digital words in the age of the personal computer is the greatest enemy of the literary archive. When I first started using email, I had a surge of optimism that the age of letter writing may be returning. That quickly disappeared. My attempts to organize my inbox collapsed in an indiscriminate deluge of spam, group mailings, business, and personal correspondence. Then, I found even personal exchanges with my friends devolving into the hieroglyphic form of the office memo. My hope vanished the first time my server performed an automatic housekeeping operation and made a clean sweep of all my older messages, spam and love letters alike. What of the record of the creative process? My thought turns to Kafka’s manuscript, a physical object that visibly communicates the euphoria of creativity but also the agonizing search for the right word or phrase. What traces of the writing process will survive from our own time? Will families of deceased authors donate hard drives to the archive in the hope that some future generation of technologists will be able to decipher the genesis of masterworks from ghostlike etchings on silicone micro-chips? Probably not. The word processor produces neither a manuscript nor a palimpsest, just a series of ‘present’ versions. Perhaps we are facing an irony of almost cosmic proportions. Never has a period of human history produced as many words as our own. Never has it been easier to communicate, never easier to generate and disseminate words. Yet it may well be that future generations of scholars will find that the rich record of intimate life, private thought, and the processes of our creative work trails off right around the time the delete button was invented.

  June 1, 2009
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