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CSMC
CSMCCentre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures

Photo: Karsten Helmholz

Research

Wandering Artefacts

The Materialistic History of German-Jewish Archives

2020–2024

RFE10

Parts of the estate of writer and scholar Ludwig Strauss (1892-1953) as they were received by the National Library of Israel in the late 2000s.

This project explores the interconnectedness of materiality, displacement, and identity-building by means of a deep and thorough materialistic analysis of selected German-Jewish archives and collections held at the National Library of Israel that are currently being digitised. The project intends to reveal the archival community of a certain generation of 19th and 20th century German-Jewish scholars and writers and to examine its far-reaching implications for post-Holocaust identity building. We wish to develop a comprehensive study that offers a materialistic analysis of these German-Jewish archives and their at times convoluted history of transmission. This perspective can bridge the existing gap between theoretical research on archives and archiving and the study of the particular case of German-Jewish thinkers, opening new avenues of research into the volatile nature of archives in general. The absence of many letters and documents from the archives as well as the constant discovery of others in different estates point to the 'perforated nature‘ of the archive itself, which is not a monolithic entity, but is rather in an ongoing dialogue with others. The constant exchanges between this generation of German-Jewish thinkers shaped a multilingual 'community of archives‘, which had a particular political meaning in the framework of 20th century Jewish history where archives played a pivotal role as both testimonies to the violence of destruction and monuments to the material underpinnings of Jewish culture.

People

Project lead: Giuseppe Veltri

Research Associate: Sebastian Schirrmeister

List of NLI archives and collections

List of NLI archives and collections being digitised

  1. Altenberg, Peter (collection) | impressionist Austrian writer and renown ‘coffee house poet’ |1859-1919 | NLI catalogue entry
  2. Baum, Oskar (collection) | blind author and journalist and member of the ‘Prague Circle’ | 1883-1941 | NLI catalogue entry
  3. Ben-Gavriêl, Moshe Ya'akov (archive) |Vienna born journalist and novelist, ardent believer in the pan-Asian ideal | 1891-1965 | NLI catalogue entry
  4. Bergmann, Escha Else (archive) | writer and Brit Shalom activist, married to G. Scholem and later to H. Bergmann | 1896-1978 | NLI catalogue entry
  5. Bergmann, Shmuel Hugo (archive) | philosopher and librarian, schoolmate of F. Kafka, M. Brod and F. Weltsch | 1883-1975 | NLI catalogue entry
  6. Buber, Martin (archive, excl. letters)* | philosopher and educator, close associate of F. Rosenzweig | 1878-1965 | NLI catalogue entry
    * Buber’s correspondence is being digitised in a separate project at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
  7. Burchardt, Hermann (archive) | photographer and orientalist who travelled the Muslim world | 1857-1909 | NLI catalogue entry
  8. Ehrenstein, Albert (archive) | expressionist poet, died in exile in New York | 1886-1950 | NLI catalogue entry
  9. Guttmann, Julius Itzhak (collection) | rabbi and religious philosopher, author of Philosophie des Judentums (1933) | 1880-1950 | NLI catalogue entry
  10. Kaufmann, Yehezkel (archive) | philosopher and biblical scholar | 1889-1963 | NLI catalogue entry
  11. Kayser, Rudolf (archive) | writer and literary scholar, son-in-law of A. Einstein | 1889-1964 | NLI catalogue entry
  12. Kaznelson, Siegmund (archive) | Zionist editor and publisher | 1893-1959 | NLI catalogue entry
  13. Landauer, Gustav (collection) | pacifist and anarchist, murdered in prison in 1919 | 1870-1919 | NLI catalogue entry
  14. Lazarus, Moritz (archive) | philosopher and psychologist, founder of ‘Völkerpsychologie’ | 1824-1903 | NLI catalogue entry
  15. Löw, Immánuel (archive) | Hungarian rabbi and scholar, expert on biblical plant names | 1854-1944 | NLI catalogue entry
  16. Nadel, Arno (archive) | musician and musicologist, forced to work in the library of the Reichsicherheitshauptamt, killed in Auschwitz | 1878-1943 | NLI catalogue entry
  17. Popper-Lynkeus, Josef (archive) | Austrian philosopher and engineer, considered a precursor of Einstein, Freud and Herzl | 1838-1921 | NLI catalogue entry
  18. Raas, Emil (collection) | Swiss lawyer and close friend of Else Lasker-Schüler | 1910-1993 | NLI catalogue entry
  19. Scholem, Gerschom (archive) | scholar of Jewish mysticism and collector of Judaica books | 1897-1982 | NLI catalogue entry
  20. Simon, Ernst Akibah (archive) | educator and religious philosopher, close associate of M. Buber | 1899-1988 | NLI catalogue entry
  21. Steinthal, Heymann (collection) | philologist and philosopher, associate of M. Lazarus | 1823-1899 | NLI catalogue entry
  22. Strauss, Ludwig (archive) | teacher, writer and literary scholar with a focus on Friedrich Hölderlin | 1892-1953 | NLI catalogue entry
  23. Weltsch, Felix (archive) | librarian, philosopher and writer from Prague | 1884-1964 | NLI catalogue entry
  24. Wissenschaft des Judentums (letter collection) | 19th century intellectual movement in Germany, precursor of modern Jewish Studies | NLI catalogue entry

A full list of all NLI archival holdings can be found here.

Zwischen Hamburg und Jerusalem

In cooperation with the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) / Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ at Universität Hamburg, the National Library of Israel has completed the cataloguing and digitisation of 24 German-Jewish collections and estates comprising more than 700,000 pages by the end of 2022. A public evening event as part of the workshop conference ‘Imag(in)ing Materiality’ provided initial insights into the extensive, diverse and unique holdings and explored the potential of these and similar archives for a new look at German-Jewish history and the present.