Memory Culture's Archival Turn

FOUNDED ON A COMMITMENT to remembering National Socialism and the Holocaust, the Berlin Republic is defined by Erinnerungskultur (memory culture). This book argues that Erinnerungskultur, as it has developed in unified Germany, is increasingly bound to the archive— understood in its broadest sense as the material remnants of the past and the structures and spaces that house them. As those who lived through the Nationalist Socialist period reach the end of their lives, younger generations are increasingly dependent on externalized, material forms of memory, resulting in an “archival turn” in the memory culture of the Berlin Republic. The archive features in this context as a historical resource to help bridge the growing gap between the Third Reich and contemporary Germany, but also—and this is crucial to my argument—to materialize, visualize, and narrativize the (often intangible, invisible, and elusive) work of memory. The close connection between Erinnerungskultur and the archive in the Berlin Republic is seen in three installation pieces found in and around the renovated German Parliament Building. Christian Boltanski's Archiv der Abgeordneten (Archive of the German Representatives, 1999) is an imposing structure of tin boxes, designed to look like floorto- ceiling card-index boxes, which carry the names of nearly five thousand members of parliament elected democratically between 1919 and 1999. A single black box represents the rupture in the history of German democracy marked by the Third Reich, and black strips, like small mourning bands, are found on the boxes carrying the names of politicians who became victims of National Socialism. Beyond the names and dates legible on the surface, Boltanski's installation does not contain any substantial information: here, the archive does not feature primarily as an historical resource, but rather in its formal and aesthetic elements to evoke the past (the tin boxes are even marked by rust to suggest aging). Boltanski's installation shows how the recent turn to the archive is made in aesthetic and aestheticized mode to make visible the act of commemoration.

Although Boltanski's installation was made to be seen, Archiv also thematizes invisibility, oversight, and repression.