Workshop and evening eventGerman-Jewish Archives in the Digital Age

30 May 2023

Photo: Sebastian Schirrmeister

The National Library of Israel and CSMC have digitised 24 written estates of German-Jewish intellectuals from the 20th century. A workshop now provides first insights into the possibilities this opens up for research. Special highlights from the archives are presented at an evening event.

They occupy a total of 120 metres on the shelves and comprise over 700,000 pages: At the end of 2022, CSMC and the National Library of Israel (NLI) completed their extensive joint project of digitising the written estates of 24 German-Jewish intellectuals that are stored at NLI. What new possibilities arise for scholars who can now work with the digitised material instead of the physical written artefacts in the archive? And which aspects might be lost sight of when they access the material digitally? The workshop ‘Imag(in)ing Materiality’ from 5 to 7 June at CSMC will address these questions. For the first time, scholars had the opportunity to work with the digitised archives and will present first results.

‘It will be thrilling to see how the participants of our workshop have dealt with the digitised material’, says Sebastian Schirrmeister, who organised the conference together with Giuseppe Veltri. The two run the research project on ‘Wandering Artefacts: The Materialistic History of German-Jewish Archives’, in the context of which the workshop is taking place. ‘What difference does it make to have a digital copy instead of a real page in front of you? On the one hand, the viewer may miss details, for example traces of use, which, depending on the research focus, can be crucial. On the other hand, we can now find out things that would have been impossible to find out before, or only possible with disproportionate effort. With the digital copies, we can gain an overview in a very short time and, for example, see how much or when someone wrote or search for recurring elements such as letterheads. At the workshop, we want to have an exchange on the extent to which digital access affects our scholarly work.’

The conference will be accompanied by an evening event (in German) on 6 June at 6:30 pm in the Warburghaus. It will focus on particularly remarkable finds in the digitised archives, which include the estates of such important personalities as Oskar Baum, Gerschom Scholem, and Martin Buber. The latter was amid a controversy that arose in 1951 when Universität Hamburg awarded him the ‘Hansische Goethe Preis’ – an affront to many Jews only a few years after the end of the Third Reich. Among several other episodes with a direct link to Hamburg, the digitised archives also include correspondence about this incident.

The artistic highlight of the evening is a performance of five pieces for voice and piano by the composer James Rothstein. The songs are based on poems from Ludwig Strauss’ ‘Land Israel’ (1935). The manuscripts of Rothstein, who was deported in 1941 and murdered in the ghetto of Lodz, are among the few handwritten music manuscripts in the digitised archives. There is no evidence that the pieces have ever been performed before.  

Registrations for the conference and workshop are running separately and can be made at the following links:

• Register for the workshop ‘Imag(in)ing Materiality: German-Jewish Archives in the Digital Age’
• Register for the evening event ‘Zwischen Hamburg und Jerusalem: Neue Einblicke in die deutsch-jüdischen Archive der Israelischen Nationalbibliothek’