Storia della StoriografiaHistoire de l’Historiographie

History of Historiography

Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung

Rivista internazionale · Revue internationale

International Review · Internationale Zeitschrift

68 · 2/2015

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Autorizzazione del Tribunale di Milano n. 310 del 26/07/1982

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Contents

ARCHIVES AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY

Georg G. Iggers, Foreword 11

part i.

scholarly practices in the archives, 1500-1800

Filippo de Vivo, Maria Pia Donato, Scholarly Practices in the Archives, 1500-1800. Introduction 15

Fabien Montcher, Archives and Empire : Scholarly Archival Practices, Royal Histo- riographers and Historical Writing across the Iberian Empire (Late 16th and Early 17th Century) 21

Fabio Antonini, “Kept within their Chests for the Benefit of their Histories” : Archival Reform and the Rise of Historical Scholarship amongst the State Records of Early Modern Venice 37

Emmanuelle Chapron, The “Supplement to All Archives” : the Bibliothèque Royale of Paris in the Eighteenth Century 53

Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen, Relics of the Past : Antiquarianism and Archival Autho- rity in Enlightenment Germany 69

part ii.

archives and history. making historical knowledge in europe

during the nineteenth century

Philipp Müller, Introduction. Archives and History. Making Historical Knowledge in Europe during the Nineteenth Century 85

David Laven, Nineteenth-Century Historians and the Venetian Archivio di Stato : Memory and Rhythms of Historical Research 89

Pieter Huistra, Reproducers Anonymous. Copyists in Nineteenth-Century Historio- graphy 107

Henning Trüper, Autopsy and Heteropsy in Nineteenth-Century Aksumite Epigraphy 121

Regina F. Bendix, Archived and Archival Culture. Ethnographic Reflections on Archival Habits 143

Mario Wimmer, The Present as Future Past : Anonymous History of Historical Times 165

Notes on Contributors 185

Storia della Storiografia, 68 · 2/2015

The Present as Future Past : Anonymous History of Historical Times*

Mario Wimmer

“Et d’abord parce qu’une mémoire suppose un lieu de con-stitution de l’histoire, un lieu d’enregistrement de l’archive populaire. Un lieu ? L’Etat ? On sait trop quelle histoire il im-pose”. 1

Abstract

In this essay I put forward the notion of an anonymous history of historical times looking at archival practices of appraisal in various German states throughout the long nineteenth century. I maintain that the process of making decisions about what to sort out of archives involved an implicit notion of both history and historical time. In that sense the history of archival appraisal turns out to be a history of the writing of history avant la lettre. The spon-taneous philosophy in archival practice amounts to an anonymous history of historical times that refrains from engagement with the texts from the past but treats them as material docu-ments. The modern archive has become the site to define the material conditions of possibil-ity of the writing of history. Ultimately these matters become the mostly overlooked prereq-uisite of the historiography of historical time.

Today more than ninety percent of the paperwork German state bureaucracy produces is sorted out, discarded, and destroyed. It is not assembled in the “sa-

cred” space of the archive but disassembled, dispersed, and, if not recycled, ready to enter the open process of the recirculation of things. This may have to do with the fact that bureaucratic communication tends to be self-referential producing multiple copies of most documents in different, transitional instances. However, the problem of sorting things out is an important one – not only for archives, where it cuts to the very understanding of the notion of the “archive”. 2 At a time when even idle infor-mation systems like the archives have become subject to rapid change, looking back at their history can be an important mode of reflection. 3

* I want to thank Tony Kaes, Monika Dommann, Daniela Saxer, and greatly regret that I cannot any more thank the late Reinhart Koselleck, for discussions of some aspects of this paper ; moreover, I would like to thank Henning Trüper and Randy Starn for important comments on its penultimate version. Earlier iterations of the argument have been presented at the German annual conference for history of science in Wuppertal in 2007, and in the modern history colloquium of Barbara Stollberg-Riellinger and her team at the University of Münster in 2006.

1 “Front and back cover”, Les Révoltes Logiques, 1 (1975) : 1.2 G. C. Bowker and S. Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out : Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge,

Mass. : MIT Press, 1999).3 For a concise historical account of archival theory see most recently : D. Schenk, Kleine Theorie des

Archivs (Stuttgart : Franz Steiner, 2008) ; J. Ridener, From Polders to Postmodernism : A Concise History of Archival Theory (Duluth, MN : Litwin Books, 2009) ; for archival appraisal F. Boles, Selecting and Appraising Archives & Manuscripts (Chicago : Society of American Archivists, 2005).

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The history of archival appraisal is a history of the writing of history avant la lettre. The spontaneous philosophy of history, as we can observe it in archival practice, amounts to an anonymous history of historical times that refrains from engagement with the texts from the past but treats them as material documents. In the modern age it has become a history of the material conditions of possibility of the writing of history as much as it is a history of the contingencies and chances of transmission of remnants of the past and their relation to the emergence of historical tradition. 4 Ul-timately these matters become the mostly overlooked prerequisite of the storia della storiografia. Yet, we do have an alternative model for thinking about the Writing of History as a set of historiographical operations, i. e. a “combination of a social place, ‘scientific’ practices, and writing”. However different the preconditions of an archi-val discourse are, attention to historiographical operations “allow[s] us to specify the silent laws which organize the space produced” – in the case in point here not as tex-tual space or the Topography of a Method of doing historical time but as sites of making historical time. 5

Looking at the practices of appraisal in German archives and in particular the de-struction of files (Kassation 6 or Aktenausscheidung) since the eighteenth century, this article aims at historicizing archival practice in order to suggest an anonymous his-tory of historical time. The notion of ‘anonymous history’ was first used in a study concerned with the history of mechanization. This inquiry into the origins, evolu-tion, and impact of mechanization reads patent drawings next to business cards in order to analyze different spaces of industrialization ; the very notion and meaning of such a history “arises in the uncovering of relationships” 7 between material-symbolic objects. Therefore names and concepts are secondary ; even facts are less important than the constellations they enter into. Anonymous history however has to pay close attention both to individual detail and dispersed practices since it is “directly connect-ed with the general, guiding ideas of an epoch. But at the same time it must be traced back to the particulars from which it arises”. 8 In the context of this essay, I cannot follow the suggestion put forward in Mechanization Takes Command to connect any number of different fields and various interrelations that shape what was described there – in some ways anticipating the notion of dispositif – as ‘constellations’. I shall limit my focus to the archive in practice in an attempt to analyze the emergence of historical time from anonymous archival practice rather than reiterate the writings of the philosophers of history or the thinking about historical time present in histori-cal writings.

4 A. Esch, “Überlieferungs-Chance und Überlieferungs-Zufall als methodisches Problem des Histori- kers”, Historische Zeitschrift, 240 (1985) : 529–570.

5 See M. de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York : Columbia University Press, 1988), 57 ; and, recently, the brilliant study by H. Tüper, Topography of a Method. François Louis Ganshof and the Writing of History (Tübingen : Mohr-Siebeck, 2014).

6 The German notion of Kassation (= noun ; verb=kassieren) goes back to the Latin cassus (empty, inane), and is a common term in legal language also in English, such as court of cassation. However in the English archival terminology cassation was never used ; today, also in German archival language it is more common to speak of appraisal to refer to the broader implications of the destruction (still referred to as Kassation) of bureaucratic documents.

7 S. Giedion : Mechanization Takes Command. A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York : Oxford University Press, 1948), 3. 8 Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 5.

the present as future past 167

Archives are often considered as dark and dull places. However, they can become laboratories for an important inquiry 9 into the conceptions and practices of histori-cal time. Thus looking at or into the archives in the context of a history of historical practice sheds new light on various aspects of an anonymous history of historical time that has so far mostly remained, so to speak, in the alleged archival dark. The practice of sorting out archival documents, I want to argue, is crucial to an under-standing of historical time and the spontaneous philosophy of history emerging from administrative and archival practice. The question of Kassation, or more generally appraisal, i. e. the problematic of what to include and exclude from the archives, was and remains tied to the very notions of the archive as well of that of historical time.

Recent scholarship in the field suggests that the history of the concept of history is more complex than the classic interpretation of the collective singular of history had suggested. It may be true that the notion of a ‘collective singular’ of History 10 can only be understood within the framework of a history and theory of History in the Plural. 11 Even if this was the case – and we have good reason to think so – the critical rethinking of the collective singular remained deeply invested in the idea of a coher-ent notion of ‘History in the singular’. In addition this account mostly overlooked the semantic ramifications of historical practice ; instead it famously focused on the changing semantics of “basic concepts of socio-political language”. 12 However, we have to face to conflicting plurality of historical times. Looking at intellectual and cultural practices of doing history as embodied symbolic forms rather than at the semantics of the language of the past allows for a different perspective on the spon-taneous philosophies of history in archival practice and the concrete ways in which archivists related to the past. In consequence, we should rather think of historical time as a material and solid metaphor in practice.

The archives are to be restructured from time to time, at least when they run out of space and the physical topography of archivalia has to be rearranged ; they constantly plasticize historical time by including the continuous flow of documents from the registry, which added to the resource of legality and governance but also as latent survivals or metaleptic sources of the past. This constant renewal of the very material configuration of the archives has involved archivists in a reflection about

9 See P. Rabinow and A. Stavrianakis, Designs on the Contemporary : Anthropological Tests (Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2014).

10 R. Koselleck et al., “Art. Geschichte, Historie”, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 2 (Stuttgart : Klett-Cotta 1979), 593-717 ; R. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History : Timing, History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2002) ; R. Koselleck, Futures Past : On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York : Columbia University Press, 2004).

11 This notion goes back to J. Taubes, “Geschichtsphilosophie und Historik : Bemerkungen zu Kosellecks Programm einer neuen Historik”, Poetik und Hermeneutik V. Geschichte – Ereignis und Erzählung, eds. R. Koselleck and W.-D. Stempel (München : W. Fink, 1973), 490-499. See also N. Olsen, History in the Plural : An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (New York : Berghahn Books, 2011).

12 Jan Marco Sawilla has criticized this approach in his meticulously researched studies on Koselleck’s work on the collective singular of History. He was able to show that the empirical evidence for Kosellecks’s claim was highly selective, and that the picture changes dramatically once we consider French as equally important language of intellectual discourse of German scholars in the eighteenth century. See J. M. Sawilla, “Geschichte und Geschichten zwischen Providenz und Machbarkeit. Überlegungen zu Reinhart Kosellecks Semantik historischer Zeiten”, Begriffene Geschichte. Beiträge zum Werk Reinhart Kosellecks, eds. H. Joas and P. Vogt (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 2011), 387-422.

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the nature of the archives including its definition and etymology. Almost every tract and handbook on the arrangement or sciences of archives since the eighteenth cen-tury commenced with a discussion of the name of the archive, and thus instigated a discourse about the double character of the archive as administrative body (Greek : archeion) and place of origin (Greek : arché).

Once we talk about the archives of the state we are dealing with the materiality of bureaucratic paperwork all the way down. Looking at the collections of parchments and the networks of documents piece after piece we can only begin to understand the very character of this specific notion of the archive. In other words : certain epis-temic environments produce material traces that determine what can become archi-val and thus the object of archivization, an object that may embody and represent the past insofar as the single document becomes part of a metonymic, i. e. ‘organic’, structure. After all, the archive is a place of consignation, a place where signs in their symbolic-material form are gathered, assembled, and reassembled. This structure of consignation implies a certain temporality, a temporality that is not to be, prema-turely, confused with History itself.

I. The Past at the Fingertips

The most delicate task of the archivist, many German-speaking scientists of the ar-chive throughout the twentieth century claimed, is the process of in- and exclusion of archival documents, the so-called Aktenkassation, since it involves an aporia : varying the notion of the past future the archivist of today has to think about the present as a future past. Facing this hopeless situation archivists until the early twentieth cen-tury mostly refrained from developing explicit rules for the Kassation of documents. Instead they relied on the implicit knowledge of their training as historians and their experience in the archive. In German discussions up to the 1920s archivists referred to this tacit knowledge as Fingerspitzengefühl, a notion that roughly translates as tactility, or tact. Yet it remained opaque if and how one could acquire this Gefühl and whether it was considered tacit knowledge or rather some sort of intuition and instinct. Ulti-mately, the notion suggested by the metaphor of Fingerspitzengefühl is the archivist who has a certain sense of the past at his fingertips.

Thus the archivist gets involved in the flow of events, by the way of a sort of tem-poral projection that connects the papery traces of the past to present and future, a future that will become the present of an historian, who will use the archive as the grounds for writing history. But is this in fact the same kind of history the archivist had in mind in the first place ? Most certainly not since even if they shared certain on-tological notions, the epistemic environment and epistemological conditions would be rather different. However, this notion of temporal projection helps us to under-stand that our relationship to the present is necessarily deferred. “Deferred by virtue of the very principle of difference which holds that an element functions and signi-fies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future ele-ment in an economy of traces”. 13 In other words, the archives are not to be confused with a place of origin but entering the archive involves the historian as well as the

13 Derrida, Positions, 28.

the present as future past 169

archivist in a complex meshwork of material traces of historical times (rather than of ‘the past’). This constitutes a situation that in the very decision of what to keep and what to sort out of the archives is fundamentally without a foundation. Thus, the economy of archival traces introduces temporality to the space of the archives, a temporality that goes beyond and is more complex than the underlying notion of ‘History in the singular’.

Surprisingly this problem does not seem to have existed before, roughly speaking, the French Revolution ; it only surfaced in the early nineteenth century when history, or the past for that matter, was still embodied in the papery form of written docu-ments. Clearly the revolutionary events have changed the very character as much as the semantics of the archives from a place for the documents of the past to a place of making history. After the initial attempt to destroy all documents of the ancien ré-gime, the revolutionaries decided to keep them, yet not for legal reasons but in order to document the degeneracy of the overthrown monarchy and make them accessible to the ‘public’.

All evidence suggests that the aporia of Kassation did not really exist before History became the obsession of a whole century. How is that ? The first step of my argument will be to attend to the question of how the aporia of archival appraisal is an early nineteenth-century phenomenon and initially was barely affected by the transforma-tions in media technology, such as the introduction of new paper, typewriters, or copying practices throughout the nineteenth century. 14 An analysis of archival prac-tices allows contradicting the naïve, if not apologetic understanding of archival tech-nique as part of an almost immoveable longue-durée history of media infrastructures. Archival practices and even basic concepts of archival classification such as the prin-ciple of provenance or archival Kassation were, in fact, subject to historical change. However they call for a complex understanding of historical time that transgresses the teleological narrative of linear history, which is simply evolving and unfolding towards an open-ended present as future past. One might say that the language we have to address certain cultural techniques always stays behind the technological de-velopments themselves : we speak of automobiles using the vocabulary of the age of horsemen, and up to this day we keep talking about the past using notions of History and historical time that are, so to say, deeply nineteenth-century 15 – even though we, at least since the 1920s, came to realize a deep transformation, if not rupture, in the history of the notion of History that had emerged in the late nineteenth century. Obviously, there is no such thing as an homogenous regime of historicity 16 but the notion of history present at any moment is invested in a complex constellation of historiographical operations that materializes as a meshwork of historical times and comes to embody always already more than what we can only perceive as a histori-cal unfolding of a potential past.

14 For a contemporary account see F. Hefele, “Schreibmaschine und Archiv”, Korrespondenzblatt der Geschichts- und Alterthumsvereine, 78 (1926) : 267-279 ; also H. Frederking, “Archivalienkonservierung”, Archivalische Zeitschrift, 40 (1931) : 201-218.

15 This is a variation on a thought put forward by Jacques Le Goff, who also never stopped advocating for a more complex model of historical time.

16 See Tüper, Topography of a Method.

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II. In and Out of the Archive around 1800

The nineteenth century had experienced a “freshly awakened and deeply founded love for German history” that expressed the recovered “national feeling”. 17 It was em-bodied and conceivable in plenty of newly discovered historical monuments which were wrenched out of “dust and decay” to be assembled as national goods. The ar-chives changed from an “object of sacred adoration and deep obscurity” to a place of critical research that shed new light on the past. 18 As the editors of the new journal of archival science claimed in 1834, with the emergence of this national consciousness over the past two decades the study of history arose to a new zenith. As a result of the evolution of this novel historical and national consciousness the institutions pre-serving the treasures of the past received remarkable attention. 19 With the growth of both content and size, the archives gained in importance for writing the history of the nation state. Yet, archivists had made similar assertions in earlier times acknowledg-ing both the historical and legal importance of the archive. 20 Certainly, the archive’s main purpose at this point was not being the resource for the production of historical knowledge and to source historical writing but, even before the French Revolution, that is often considered a turning point towards the archives becoming historical, rightfully so, archives were already considered to house materials about the past. Archival theory of the eighteenth century was concerned with the internal arrange-ment and order of the archives. 21 With one remarkable exception they aimed at a pertinent arrangement if not universal order of things following the model of library classification or the universal Enlightenment encyclopaedia. “Subsuming all particu-lar holdings and using a classification that mingled material according to subject mat-ter the notion of provenance was foreign to the nature of the archive”. 22 However in 1777 a treatise on the classification of archives for the first time suggested to arrange the archival materials following the emergent logic of documents : “So far experience taught me that the best plan (for archival classification, M. W.) is the one the docu-ments themselves provide (den die Urkunden selbst an die Hand geben)”. 23 Archival clas-sification should not be based on a universal system of classification that is applied to the material ; instead, process of abstraction using the tacit and tactile knowledge of an emergent order of the bureaucratic process of decision-making and translate it to an historical classification of ‘original order’ one should follow the later, this would be called ‘provenance’. This notion of archival order was disregarded soon after it had surfaced and was not in discussion throughout the nineteenth century even though it recently has been considered as the ‘primal scene’ of the principle of provenance.

Some fifty years later, in the early nineteenth century, the endeavor of writing national histories was divided into three different aspects and respective disciplines :

17 L. F. Hoefer, H. A. Erhard and F. L. B. von Medem, “Vorrede”, Zeitschrift für Archivkunde, Diplomatik und Geschichte, 1 (1834) : I-VI, I.

18 H. A. Erhard, “Ideen zur wissenschaftlichen Begründung und Gestaltung des Archivwesens”, Zeitschrift für Archivkunde, Diplomatik und Geschichte, 1 (1834) : 183-215, 183.

19 Hoefer et al., “Vorrede”, II. 20 P. E. Spieß, Über Archiven (1777), 5.21 See, for instance, J. C. F. Stuss, Von Archiven und besonders von der Einrichtung eines deutschen

reichsständigen Regierungsarchivs (Leipzig, 1799). 22 Brennecke, Archivkunde, 50.23 Spieß, Über Archive, 27.

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first, the writing of history, second, diplomatic dealings with the material form of the monuments of the past, and, third, archival science or archivology (Archivkunde) – all concerned with the institutional context of historical tradition. However, this industrious striving for the empirical study of the national pasts had already started to define the character of the archive in the early nineteenth century. Yet it was not just a “chamber of antiquities” that furnished “historical and other researchers” with materials from the past. 24 It also had to maintain its legal-administrative functions. 25 Thus registry and archive had an intimate connection : the registry was understood as a “temporary holding” of “future archivals” ; the archive, on the other hand, was to be “functionally arranged and ordered, as a permanent integrating holding that had to assume a dignified, necessary and useful substance”. 26 Therefore a later sighting and elimination of documents was to be avoided. Once materials had entered the quasi ‘sacred’ space of the archive – a notion frequently used in the late eighteenth century in particular – and had become archivalia they transformed into sacrosanct relics of the past that related to the ‘organic’ whole of the archive. 27

The archive was to be understood as the “safe place or container” where a “col-lection of public transactions” was kept. 28 Other than the registry that dealt with the present, the archive was the place of the past. Yet without its relation to the registry the archive perceived this way would have been a “mass of dead matter”. 29 With the increase of administrative writing the nation state and its bureaucracy left a grow-ing trail of paperwork that made the matter of the archives increasingly complex and opaque. As a consequence for the archivist, it was no longer possible to have a comprehensive view of how the single document related to the archive as a whole. Individual archival documents were more and more perceived as part of a complex and historically contingent body of documents. The individual document could thus only be understood in its symbolic-material context. Due to the irreversible plastic-ity of the archival body the assumption of an ‘original’ context of the document had ideological implications about the past and the very character of the archival docu-ment itself. After all it is only possible to invoke a document and cite out of context otherwise the past would be self-identical, an impossible reiteration of itself.

Archivists around 1800 had to come up with a solution for distinguishing between “the useless and unnecessary and all the unrelated matter from the lasting and use-ful staff […] and thus, by sorting it out, limit the infinite process of accumulation”. 30 Therefore agencies decided to create files that were already “purged from slug” and had proper “functional and archival consistency and order”. 31 The archivist had to “necessarily reduce” materials that were coming in from the registry even though it was “actually inseparable” from the registry. 32 The registry was some sort of “ante-chamber” (Vorhalle) to the archive. It contained materials that sooner or later had to be delivered to the archive. Yet despite this distinction the purpose of both the regis-

24 “Ueber Archive und Registraturen”, 254. 25 See Vismann, Files.26 “Ueber Archive und Registraturen”, 254-255.27 See, for instance, Anonymous, Zwey Schreiben eines Vaters an seinen Sohn, von der Heiligkeit der Archive,

1756. 28 “Ueber Archive und Registraturen”, 250.29 “Ueber Archive und Registraturen”, 250.30 “Ueber Archive und Registraturen”, 248-249.31 “Ueber Archive und Registraturen”, 249. 32 “Ueber Archive und Registraturen”, 250.

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try and the archive was identical : the instruction and conception of files in the regis-try had to anticipate the consecutive archival order. The public office was supposed only to generate paperwork that could later find its appropriate place in the archive. The document of the present would thus be that of a future past.

Then the perspective of a potential reiteration of bureaucratic correspondence would allow rationalizing the flow of paperwork in the first place. The hope was that this would increase “order and certainty” and the efficiency of public service itself. 33 Not only would such a controlled way of administrative communication streamline the process of retrieval of documents but this methodological creation of files would also precipitate and expedite bureaucratic communication and decision-making. All one had to do, an archivist claimed, was to exclude “alien parts” and purge the pa-perwork from what he called “trivial exhibitional correspondence”. 34 Yet, he hardly elaborated in detail or in concreto what one had to consider as ‘alien’ to the body of documents. This is a remarkable and surprising suggestion since this so-called ‘exhi-bitional correspondence’ refers to those writings in the process of decision-making that expose and delineate the case and its context. Excluding these elements from a file basically reduced it to a legal document modelled after the act or charter, i.e. Urkunde in German, a document that focused on the result and not the process of decision-making. This strategy of bureaucratic rationalization contradicted the his-torian’s interest in the very process of acts of decision-making that would later in the nineteenth century become the essential notion of their historiographical narrative and an implicit theory of history in the making. From the perspective of a late nine-teenth century Historik the historiographical and epistemic beauty of files was that they embodied the process of how negotiations and affairs turned into History – “wie aus Geschäften Geschichte wird”. 35

Yet around 1800 archivists and registrars were supposed to collaborate in order to keep and make space for the future archival tradition. Therefore the archivist had to convince himself of the “presaged order of things and, if necessary, correct it”. 36 Thus he had to do some sort of double ‘bookkeeping’ between registry and archives : “since if one firmly insisted that only those materials that sooner or later were deemed to become part of the archive had their pertinent place in the registry”. 37 Anything else could always already be excluded from the archival realm. This notion of an ideal bureaucratic order of things that allowed for a flawless manipulation of archival objects related to an understanding of rational and efficient administration : “Once the archive was in order and perfectly arranged one could manage with at least one archivist less”, 38 noted a contemporary observer. Yet this conception of the archive remained rather idiosyncratic in particular in its aforementioned aspect of classifica-tion respecting the provenance of documents rather than their pertinence. Ultimate-ly the notion of provenance would only be introduced in Dutch and German archival

33 “Ueber Archive und Registraturen”, 252. 34 “Ueber Archive und Registraturen”, 252.35 J. G. Droysen, Historik. Rekonstruktion der ersten vollständigen Fassung der Vorlesungen (1857), Grundriß

der Historik in der ersten handschriftlichen (1857/1858) und in der letzten gedruckten Fassung (1882), ed. P. Leyh, 1 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt : Frommann-Holzboog, 1977), 69 : “Aus den Geschäften wird Geschichte aber sie sind nicht Geschichte”. 36 Ibid., 252. 37 Ibid., 251-252.

38 Spieß, Über Archive, 11 : “Wäre das Archiv einmal in Ordnung und vollkommen eingerichtet, so könnte alsdann auch einer der Archivarien gar wohl entbehrt werden”.

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administration in the late nineteenth century. Its general implementation would take another couple of decades until it finally became an international standard during the negotiations of Versailles, when Austria, using a particular interpretation of the principle of provenance, succeeded in keeping as many archival materials as possible in Vienna ; only parts of the documents of the former Habsburg empire went to its other successor states. In the aftermath of World War I the international professional community of archivists would indirectly reaffirm the principle of provenance as standard of archival classification only some years later.

Still, the sorting out of things had to be managed already around 1800 since ar-chives were perceived as to run out of space. “One had to either dedicate bigger vaults to the archive, or all such files that could be expected to have most likely if not most definitely no future value […] should be removed”. 39 One had to either expand the material space of the archive or get rid of archival materials. Looking back to the future of the archive, one had to be “especially careful putting this at work to make sure that no shred of files would be discarded that could have some value or impact in the future”. 40 Only files older than at least fifty, better hundred years could be sorted out. The archivist was not supposed to just browse the rubrics but study each document in detail in order to make an informed decision. Yet, each stack of papers to be sorted out had to be double-checked by another high-ranking government of-ficial. It should not be the archivist alone to make the decision about the Kassation of documents. The future of the archives should be in the hand of both government officials and archivists alike. This would solely become the archivist’s task by the end of the nineteenth century when the first public debate about archival appraisal (Ak-tenkassation) started. 41

III. Kassation around 1900: The Present Archives of a Future Past

At the second annual conference of German archivists that took place in Dresden in September 1900 the issue of archival appraisal was one of the most discussed top-ics. An experienced state archivist at the Royal State Archives of Schleswig gave a paper on the “Principles for the Appraisal of Files (Aktenkassation)” that found broad resonance in the audience. All archivists present approved to the importance of the problem of archival appraisal, however they could only agree to disagree on ques-tions of methodology. The presenter, a trained historian previously teaching at a Gymnasium, was working at the Prussian Privy State Archives in the 1860s before he was appointed to organize the recently founded state archives of Schleswig in 1871.

Back in Berlin he had been part of a group of archivists whose thinking and train-ing was described by the foremost historian of historism, who, back then, was an aspirant for archival service : “Entering the stacks this vast mass of files, one had to tramp through and often had to climb with ladders, was full of monstrous, but mute

39 Stuss, Von Archiven, 25. 40 Spieß, Über Archive, 11.41 In 1876 and 1881, Franz von Löher, director of the Bavarian State Archives and editor of the Archivalische

Zeitschrift, made some remarks about the issue of archival appraisal in two long articles that introduced to both archival science and archival arrangement. However, the position he takes there is not significant for our question. See F. von Löher, “Ausscheidung des Ungehörigen”, Archivalische Zeitschrift, 1 (1876) : 52-59 ; F. von Löher, “Sondierung der Archivalien”, Archivalische Zeitschrift, 6 (1881) : 313-316.

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life”. 42 To someone who had spent much time in the archives, historism was not on-ly history as a scholarly discipline but history concerned with the problem of past life in an emphatic sense, a certain sense of the past. The past materialized in the stacks of the archive : they were “huge”, but “almost intimately-close”. It was this intimate proximity to the paper organism that every archivist was advised to search for dur-ing his training : “Go, walk around in the stacks”, prompted senior colleagues, “look at and go through whatever interests you. Since the archivist has to have a loving relationship to his archives as the collector has to his treasures”. 43

In the fall of 1870 the aforementioned archivist was assigned the task to sketch a plan for the arrangement of the Schleswig state archives. Schleswig had been Dan-ish until the German-Danish War of 1864. Initially Schleswig (along with Holstein) was under Austrian-Prussian rule until Schleswig was handed over to Prussian ad-ministration in 1865. As a consequence of the German War of 1866, Schleswig was annexed by Prussia thus its archives had to be incorporated into German history. During his last months in Berlin the archivist had the chance to familiarize himself with the files on the case. The director of the Prussian archives approved his plan in December of the same year. Soon he would leave for Schleswig to take on this new task to arrange the archives of the state. A task that would keep him occupied for the most of his career. Within the following decades, he did not only get intimate knowledge of, but, as he put it, “grew together” with the archive. 44 That was, in fact, what happened also in other cases : archival knowledge and the thinking-style of archivists were embodied in the bureaucratic paper organism that became a space of material traces from the past, they formed, what German archivists, as early as in the 1870s, had started to refer to as “archival bodies”, a concrete network of files addressing one another and representing past actions and events. 45 Other than the administration, who was thinking of the holdings as part of one archive, the archivists proposed to classify the documents according to their administrative provenance and create different repositories or ‘archival bodies’. Even later, when large numbers of documents where delivered from Copenhagen between 1874-1876, the archivists of Schleswig insisted on the principle of provenance and abstained from including those documents in the Schleswig archives but redirected them, for the time being, to the registries of different government agencies.

The new Schleswig archive included the files of the Reichskammergericht and the Herzoglich Ploensche Acten along with older collections of files that were kept in Schloss Gottorp until 1868. A government official had been instructed to take a survey of all public agencies and offices in the province in order to assemble relevant files for the new archive. Based on his groundwork a group of ten archivists worked on the ar-rangement and classification of documents in the new archive. It took them thirty years to come to a penultimate order. An introduction to the archive and overview

42 F. Meinecke, “Einführung”, L. von Ranke, Politisches Gespräch. Mit einer Einführung von Friedrich Meinecke (Berlin : Duncker und Humblot, 1924), 5-15.

43 F. Meinecke, Erlebtes 1862-1901 (Leipzig : Koehler & Amelang, 1941), 23.44 Meinecke, Erlebtes, 28.45 M. Wimmer, Archivkörper. Eine Geschichte historischer Einbildungskraft (Paderborn : Konstanz Univer-

sity Press, 2012).

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of the holdings was first published in 1900. 46 In the process of handling the incom-ing piles of files the archivists created preliminary lists of the content of those stacks of paperwork. “That made me realize”, wrote the lead-archivist of the project, “that a lot had to be sorted out as worthless”, in order to explain that he still “held back on the destruction of files during the first couple of years since I did not yet trust my knowledge and my judgment and because I assumed with reason that I should rather keep those files that would lose their provisional value for the time being”. 47 The archivists had been shy of sorting documents out for almost a decade before they ultimately decided that they had to accept the risk to throw out documents that might later gain interest rather than keeping them along with hundreds of use- and worthless papers.

It was only after the end of the arrangement of the Schleswig archives that the lead-archivists started to reflect on the process and report on their spadework in the Schleswig archive : first, in the introduction to the holdings of the archives, and, shortly after, in a paper he delivered at the German Archivtag of the same year. “I am afraid that there are archivists that due to exaggerated caution with Kassation dam-age their archives. No one would take the matter of archival appraisal (Aktenkassa-tion) lightheartedly”. 48 Nonetheless archivists had to sort out documents to avoid being overwhelmed by the masses of paperwork. Yet they refrained from sorting out archival documents for years until they had familiarized themselves with the materials as well as with the needs of both private and official users. They were well aware that one could not avoid mistakes : the Schleswig archivists kept pieces that could also be thrown out, and got rid of materials that were requested again soon after their destruction. Whenever they had any doubts or second thoughts they would collaboratively discuss the case at hand. This kind of discussion and corpo-rate decision-making was established in other archives as well, most famously in the Prussian Privy State Archive and the Reichsarchiv that was founded in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I.

However, in the Schleswig archives the group of archivists developed a set of rules of archival appraisal. Most importantly they introduced a threshold before which all documents would be preserved. Any document dating before the year of 1560, the year after the death of King Christian III of Denmark, was kept. From the point of the archivists and historians all these older documents had “historical value”. On the other hand they only kept those documents, which had emerged after the threshold of 1560, if they had contributed to the implementation of major legal matters. This decision was a result of the close collaboration and the discussions with so-called official users of the archives, i. e. government officials, who still were involved in conversations and negotiations with the archivists about the appraisal of documents. At this point professional historians did not yet have a seat at the table in discussions of archival appraisal. It was the archivists, who had the final say about the afterlife of bureaucratic paperwork. Thus the Schleswig archivists kept files of the higher au-thorities and parts of the lower ones, but discarded most of the files of intermediate

46 G. Hille, Übersicht über die Bestände des K. Staatsarchivs zu Schleswig (Leipzig : Hirzel, 1900).47 Hille, Übersicht, 5. 48 G. Hille, “Die Grundsätze bei Aktenkassationen”, Korrespondenzblatt der Geschichts- und Alterthums-

vereine, 78 (1926) : 26-31, 26.

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instances since they assumed that they mostly reduplicated the correspondence of other agencies without adding much to the process of bureaucratic decision-making. They also committed to keep the files of important lawsuits, and materials connected to social movements and working class history.

These ‘positive’ rules were paralleled by a set of ‘negative’ ones in order to keep the archives from being overwhelmed by the continuous flow of paperwork. Thus they decided to get rid of all archival documents that recognized private legal claims. And in a similar way they sorted out most of the only genealogically relevant materi-als. The fact that someone filled a particular position in a pedigree was not enough reason to keep all those birth and death certificates. Even though they were eager to support the work of some genealogists, 49 the wave of genealogical research at the time kept archivists from doing more important work. This was, most likely, also a political side blow against a novel form of ‘scientific genealogy’ that took the biological dimensions of cultural heredity seriously. For those new genealogists re-search in genealogy was supposed to bridge the gaps between human, social and the natural sciences. However most archivists insisted on a different politics of archival appraisal :

I was well aware that those personalia of the great-grandfather or grandfather of a not yet born future Goethe might later be terribly missed once I had sent them to the paper mill, but still I have to give them away as long as I do not want to follow the view of my friend, who had assumed that every single file should be kept for all times. 50

But what about cases that were not as clear-cut as to be classed under the positive and negative rules ? Indeed, there were more complicated types of mass documents. As a rule of thumb the Schleswig archivists suggested that in case of doubt one could keep all kinds of smaller piles of documents – holding on to them would do no harm, and they might turn out to be useful for future historians after all. Yet certain groups of mass documents were demanding the archivist’s decision since, without destruc-tion, they would flood the stacks and make the archivist drown in a paper deluge. One typical example were the so-called Amtsrechnungen, a group of financial mass documents they initially considered ready for destruction. They had, in the first place, decided to keep only one set of Amtsrechnungen for each decade. Yet it turned out soon that they were valuable sources for various public inquiries and that it was crucial to keep full record of the financial transactions. Thus only duplicates could be sorted out. Similar cases were made for analogous types of documents, and it be-came a general rule to avoid keeping more than one copy of a document.

In his paper at the Archivtag the lead-archivist of the Schleswig group came to the conclusion that the matter of Aktenkassation was not a theoretical issue but could only be discussed in practice : “Theoretically conceived rules for archival appraisal (Kassation)”, he prompted, “are worthless”. 51 This emphasis on practice was typi-

49 O. Lorenz, Lehrbuch der gesammten wissenschaftlichen Genealogie (Berlin : W. Hertz, 1898). For an histo-rical contextualization see B. Gausemeier, “Auf der ‘Brücke zwischen Natur- und Geschichtswissenschaft’ : Ottokar Lorenz und die Neuerfindung der Genealogie um 1900”, Wissensobjekt Mensch : humanwissenschaft-liche Praktiken im 20. Jahrhundert, eds. F. Vienne and C. Brandt (Berlin : Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2008), 137-164.

50 Hille, “Die Grundsätze bei Aktenkassationen”, 27.51 Hille, “Die Grundsätze bei Aktenkassationen”, 30.

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cal for the thinking of archivists at the time and beyond. In the discussion following the lecture everyone could not but agree to this point. However, there were several questions raised by the audience. Looking at them, we get a more complete picture of the state of affairs on Aktenkassation around 1900. One archivist in the audience suggested redirecting materials to other kinds of archives, such as church archives, municipal or private archives in order to keep them accessible for historical research even though they were not relevant to the archival tradition of the state. More im-portantly, this issue entered into a discussion of the historical value of documents be-yond the legal responsibilities of state archives. An Austrian historian present in the discussion was astonished by the fact that German archivists would not consult with historians on issues of archival appraisal. In other countries, he claimed, referring to the example of his home country, this would already be the case. Despite their train-ing as historians, archivists would primarily take a bureaucratic standpoint on the matter. Since the archives were also institutions of historical research, he argued, the historians’ perspective had to be taken into account. He insisted that “the historical discipline demanded a much broader preservation of files” than the archivists sug-gested. 52 Equally, several archivists articulated concerns against the willingness to sort documents out. Instead they proposed some sort of sampling. The director of the Metz state archive, for instance, suggested keeping all survey documents of the census (Volkszählungszettel) of at least one year for each generation. Therefore archi-vists had to agree on a year in order to have a cross-section of all census documents for one year. They decided to appoint a commission of archivists to determine what other type of mass documents should be kept as samples and to set a year for each type of mass documents.

It was only around 1900 that German archivists, as a result of the discussions at the Archivtag, joined a debate about the importance of archival appraisal in the age of a paper deluge – agreeing that rules had to be praxeological rather than theoretical. Although there was a broad consensus about the rules for the historical sections of archival holdings, there was dispute, hesitation and doubt about more recent docu-ments, or, in other words, the present archives of a future past. By this way the archi-vists, dealing with the material remains of the past, anticipated the historians writing of history as selective rearrangement of the past that, to a large extent, was based on these archival materials. In the preceding decades they had started to realize that with increasing bureaucratic mass communication and the resulting change in paper quality the matter of the archives had become precarious. They had entered a discus-sion of standards of paper quality and were deeply concerned that the matter of the archives of the future might decay, dissolve and disintegrate, or, as an archivist put it, one had to be concerned that the task of the future archivist would be to sweep out the deteriorated scraps of paper.

In the years following this first public discussion of Aktenkassation, archivists began to realize that the changes in media technology would affect bureaucratic commu-nication ; and, indeed, if one thinks of the so called office reform (Büroreform) and its consequences of bureaucratic rationalization and strive for efficiency it did very much so. In addition archivists also faced another, maybe even more dramatic, trans-

52 Hille, “Die Grundsätze bei Aktenkassationen”, 31.

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formation namely the introduction of typewritten materials, or, as one archivist had it, a change from the individual character of single handwritten to typed standardized and thus ‘typical’ if not formulaic documents. All these aspects together contributed to a fundamental change in the understanding of both the archive and historical time towards the end of the so-called long nineteenth century. This radical change, which traces back to the 1870s, reset the conditions for a re-emergence of the discussion of archival appraisal in the aftermath of World War I. Along these lines, the notion of Kassation around 1900 was retrospective rather than forward-looking, or, as one archi-vist put it :

I have […] only considered the past and not thought about the future. – One is more likely to come up with accurate rules for archival appraisal when talking about the files of a died off agency than when referring to the day-by-day growing fresh flow of files of which no human being could predict a trajectory. 53

Thus what would apply to the past, “probably had no relevance for the future”. 54

IV. Archival Decisionism between the World Wars

Even considering the increased proliferation of written matter throughout the nine-teenth century, a vast expansion of paperwork took place around 1900. Due to new forms of governance and bureaucratization the administration extended to all as-pects of public and private life. Together with technological innovations such as the typewriter and different technologies of the copy this caused an unforeseeable explo-sion of paperwork. With the introduction of carbon paper in public administration, for instance, one could produce up to seven copies of a single document that – once it was distributed within the agency – could snowball an avalanche of administrative communications. What condensed into the formula “because much had to be writ-ten, even more had to be written” 55 for nineteenth-century Prussia, became even truer for the bureaucratic dynamic in the age of technological media of transmission. The mechanization of bureaucracy took command and transformed public adminis-tration and, in consequence, fundamentally changed archival practice. The bureau-cratic paper organism was a huge, self-regulating system emerging from administra-tive practice : “Registering outgoing documents, taking notes, and collecting drafts and letters led to an exponential growth of written matter”. 56

When not even the principle of provenance as an efficient and pragmatic form of classification and arrangement allowed marshalling the masses of documents, archi-vists in Germany entered into an intense debate about the destruction of documents. Prussian archivists introduced an emphatic notion of decision-making if not decision-ism that was, to some extent, a reaction to the relativistic implications of historism as they were discussed as ‘crisis of historism’ 57 since the late nineteenth century. Was

53 Hille, “Die Grundsätze bei Aktenkassationen”, 30.54 Hille, “Die Grundsätze bei Aktenkassationen”, 30.55 R. Koselleck, Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution. Allgemeines Landrecht, Verwaltung und soziale Be-

wegung von 1791–1848 (Stuttgart : Klett-Cotta, 1967), 666. 56 Vismann, Files, 96.57 Troeltsch, “Krise” ; K. Mannheim, “Historismus”, Wissenssoziologie. Auswahl aus dem Werk, ed. K. H.

Wolf (Neuwied : Luchterhand, 1970) ; F. Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, 2 vol. (Munchen, Berlin :

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it possible that the alleged crisis in historical consciousness and thought was a reflec-tion of a transformation in the anonymous and material history of things ?

What had started out as a discussion of archival appraisal around 1900 turned into a debate about (historical) value, selection, and destruction only about two decades later. Once again the question was what is of historical and archival value – “ar-chivwürdig”, “inhaltlich” or “historisch wertvoll”. In retrospect the then director of the archive school in Marburg and former member of the Nazi SA wrote about this situ-ation with some sort of self-critical reflection :

This conception that was obviously determined by a notion and intention of the destruction of the worthless (Kassation des Wertlosen) has to be fundamentally transformed by a new at-titude of the archivist. […] The suggestive orientation towards selection and destruction can not push the idea of conservation in the background. 58

At first, the discussion about archival appraisal was a reaction to the dissolution of a series of agencies in the aftermath of World War I. During the Great War many new agencies and bureaucratic institutions emerged. In particular the Reichsarchiv had to deal with masses of documents that with the end of the war became archival. 59 These loads of paperwork were kept in different provisional places—with large parts of the paperwork mostly disorganized. 60 The Reichsarchiv became the center for re-search on issues of archival technique and method. 61 Archivists there worked on es-tablishing systematic criteria for archival appraisal and considering the practice thus far as laissez faire. Everyone was obliged to document the considerations and rea-sons for the destruction of documents in so-called Erfahrungs- und Motivenberichte. 62 A commission on issues of archival appraisal (Kassations-Kommission) was appointed and would henceforth discuss and debate these matters until 1945. Since 1937 this group of colleagues and friends, who all were loyal party members, were assigned to develop analogue criteria of Aktenausscheidung for other Prussian archives. 63 The protocols of the meetings of the Reichsarchiv’s leading archivists recorded some of these negotiations and decision-making processes in detail. 64 Between 1935 and 1944 the director of the Reichsarchiv together with the director of the Prussian archives ap-proved a series of instructions about archival politics, in particular on the destruction

Oldenburg, 1936). See G. G. Iggers, The German Conception of History : The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT : Wesleyan University Press, 19832) ; O. G. Oexle, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeichen des Historismus (Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996) ; R. Laube, Karl Mannheim und die Krise des Historismus (Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004).

58 Papritz, Archivwissenschaft, p. 144.59 E. Müsebeck, “Der Einfluß des Weltkrieges auf die archivalische Methode”, Archivalische Zeitschrift, 38

(1929) : 135-150 ; M. Herrmann, “Das Reichsarchiv 1919-1945. Eine archivische Institution im Spannungsfeld der deutschen Politik” (Humboldt University, Ph. D. dissertation, 1994).

60 E. Müsebeck, “Der systematische Aufbau des Reichsarchivs”, Preußische Jahrbücher, 191 (1923) : 302f.61 See Herrmann, Reichsarchiv. For the issue of archival appraisal in particular see E. Müsebeck,

“Grundsätzliches zur Kassation moderner Aktenbestände”, Archivstudien. Zum siebzigsten Geburtstag von Woldemar Lippert, eds. H. Beschorner, W. von Baensch and B. von Baensch (Dresden : Wilhelm und Bertha v. Baensch Stiftung, 1931), 160-165 ; H. O. Meisner, “Schutz und Pflege des staatlichen Archivgutes mit besonderer Berücksichtung des Kassationsproblemes”, Archivalische Zeitschrift, 45 (1939) : 34-51.

62 A study based on these documents remains a desideratum.63 H. Meinert, “Die Aktenwertung. Versuch einer methodologischen Zusammenfassung”, Mitteil-

ungsblatt der preußischen Archivverwaltung (1939) : 103-110.64 See Bundesarchiv Potsdam, 15.06 n. 53.

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of documents. 65 However necessary it would have been to destroy large parts of the files of the Kriegsgesellschaften of World War I, the retention periods for these masses of documents were once more extended. From the perspective of archivists the situ-ation was critical enough so that they spoke, certainly not without implicit reference to current political debate, of a state of emergency (“Notstandsarbeiten”). 66

However difficult the situation might have been, archivists were supposed to de-cide about what enters the archive and what should be sorted out as wastepaper. “Only those, who cannot discriminate, do not dare to destroy”, 67 was the fitting as well as politically over-determined slogan circulating among archivists of the Prus-sian Privy State Archives in the interwar period. Already before the Nazi seizure of power, German archivists learned Polish as part of their archival training in order to be prepared to take part in a militant turn eastwards. 68 Their sense of the past was pervaded by a decisionist understanding of archival politics.

In 1937 at the Archivtag in Gotha one of the members of the Kassationskommission reported on the state of affairs. His paper gives a good impression of the common sense and the state of the art of appraisal in the Prussian archival administration and is based on the work of appraisal in the two Prussian flagship institutions, the Prus-sian Privy State Archive and the Reichsarchiv, both of which defined the disciplinary standards and the good administrative practice for, at least, the Prussian state ar-chives. The collaborative methodological work on archival appraisal in the Reichsar-chiv condensed in the “Instructions on the appraisal of files (Aktenkassation) of mili-tary agencies at the branch offices of the Reichsarchiv” and the “Instructions for the archival treatment of files of organizations for wartime economy”.

In short, archival appraisal turned into a leap of faith – faith in both method and politics, the politics of an authoritarian regime that allowed for no hesitation or re-flection and a method that privileged rationality in case of doubt. Had archivists before 1900 used their experiences to revise their decisions, did they prefer funda-mentals to overcome any hesitation or skepticism in the interwar-period : “Today one thus has to root out the jungles of files (Aktenurwälder) in order to achieve an or-derly archival economy”. 69 The notion of ‘forest’ was one of recurrent German met-aphors for the archive. 70 Even well aware of the fact that “some time and some place any document could gain some importance”, archivists maintained that it was more important to sort things out than to follow the seductive powers of a sense of the past. Against those colleagues who contended for the notion of Fingerspitzengefühl, members of the Kassationskommission argued that archival appraisal was not an issue

65 Mitteilungsblatt des Generaldirektors der Staatsarchive, 1936, n. 3, 6.66 Abteilungsleiterbesprechung December 4 1937, BA P 15.06 53, p. 20.67 “Urteilslose wagen nicht zu kassieren”. J. Papritz, Archivwissenschaft, vol. 3, 143.68 See T. Musial, Staatsarchive im Dritten Reich : Zur Geschichte des staatlichen Archivwesens in Deutschland

1933-1945 (Berlin : Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1996) ; S. Lehr, Ein fast vergessener “Osteinsatz” : Deutsche Archivare im Generalgouvernement und im Reichskommissariat Ukraine (Düsseldorf : Droste, 2007) ; A. M. Eckert, The Struggle for the Files : The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives After the Second World War (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2012) ; for the Western front see K.-H. Roth, “Eine höhere Form des Plünderns : der Abschlußbericht der ‘Gruppe Archivwesen’ der deutschen Militärverwaltung in Frankreich 1940–1944”, 1999. Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, 4 (1989) : 79-112.

69 Meisner, “Pflege des staatlichen Archivguts”, 46.70 See M. Wimmer, “Papierorganismen : Stummes Material und verkörperte Zeit in den Archiven”, An

den Rändern der Archive, eds. Falko Schmieder et al. (Berlin, 2015 forthcoming).

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of sensation or intuition but of rationality and cognition. 71 Despite all fundamental principles of archival appraisal, “enormous amounts of scientific work had to depend on the archivist’s sensation”, or, to put it slightly different, his sense of the past. 72

Instead of trusting their colleagues’ experience and Fingerspitzengefühl, the com-mission gave a clear outline of the principles for archival appraisal (Aktenausscheid-ung) : first, anything dating before 1600 should be kept ; for this period curiosity value outweighed all rational concerns. Second, one had to define the content value of bu-reaucratic paperwork. Even though they respected the ‘relativity’ over time of the notion of “inhaltlich wichtig” materials, they insisted that the understanding of the importance of content was ‘necessary’ as fundamental criteria for archival appraisal since “in so many cases the character of this notion remains unmodified”. 73 Impor-tant in terms of content were all archivalia that documented any form of permanent institution : be it a law, a decree, or a monument of some sort. On the contrary, everything momentary or transient could be sorted out, so for instance all the ma-terials of statistical or socio-political enquiry, such as the famous nineteenth-century Enquête-Kommissionen. This notion of historical development allowed the destruction of hundreds of thousands of archival documents that could witness the internal pro-cesses of decision-making. Third, similar to the focus on permanence they suggested keeping the files of major government agencies and institutions ; in consequence the work of the so-called Mittelbehörden was considered irrelevant and their files as mere duplications and reiterations of decisions made on the top level.

In conclusion, even the proponents of archival decisionism, who were influenced by the work of the foremost legal theorist of the Nazi empire, 74 preferred principles and guidelines to dogmas and doctrines ; not because they would limit the archivist’s agency but because these principles would paralyze the archivist, weaken his sense of purpose, and hamper his decisiveness. 75 After all, archival appraisal was considered the most important task of negative archival conservation and preservation : “negativer Archivgutschutz”. This notion of archival appraisal as negativer Archivgutschutz implied a different form of temporality and historical time. Together with the decisionist craving for unambiguous judgment and ruling this negative variant of archival curat-ing resulted in a political practice of making rather than doing history. 76 Once a clear and rational method was established, this allowed ignoring the critical hesitation that had been essential to the process of archival appraisal. Aktenkassation thus became a form of archival politics in the emphatic sense that was the flip side of the Nazi gov-ernment’s attempts to make history by using the archives as an instrument of histori-

71 Wimmer, “Papierorganismen”, 46-47.72 H. Pantlen, “Grundsätzliches zur Aufbewahrung und Kassation moderner Wirtschaftsakten”,

Archivalische Zeitschrift, 41 (1932) : 159-166, 165 ; also K. Demeter, “Grundsätzliches zur Aufbewahrung und Kassation moderner Wirtschaftsakten”, Archivalische Zeitschrift, 41 (1932) : 152-166.

73 Meisner, “Pflege des staatlichen Archivguts”, 47.74 C. Schmitt, Gesetz und Urteil. Eine Untersuchung zum Problem der Rechtspraxis (Berlin : Liebmann, 1912) ;

C. Schmitt, Politische Theologie : Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (München and Leipzig : Duncker & Humblot, 1922) ; see e. g. most recently R. Mehring, Kriegstechniker des Begriffs. Biographische Studien zu Carl Schmitt (Tübingen : Mohr Siebeck, 2014).

75 Meisner, “Pflege des staatlichen Archivguts”, 50-51.76 For this distinction see M. de Certeau, L’Ecriture de l’Histoire (Paris : Gallimard, 1975), and M. de

Certeau, Histoire et Psychoanalyse entre Science et Fiction (Paris : Gallimard, 1987).

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cal revisionism : a series of legal instructions about archival politics published in the 1930s aimed at portraying Weimar culture as a period of decadence and decay. 77 Ulti-mately, this became one of the caesurae that helped distinguish the nineteenth from the twentieth century, and thus the precondition to historicize the long nineteenth century’s obsession with History.

V. The Long Nineteenth Century in the Archives

Looking at the matter of archival appraisal from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century, it becomes evident that archival practice does have a history. What started out as a mostly administrative concern in the eighteenth century turned into an issue of historical time in the aftermath of the French Revolution : what remained a question of the future of the past until ca. 1900 turned into a matter of the present as a future past afterwards. This outline of the history of practices of Aktenkassation remains schematic and focused on just a few significant cases. What remains a desid-eratum is a full historical and more detailed account of the anonymous practices of sorting things out of the archive since. It is not unlikely that such a study would re-vise what I could only sketch out in this paper, as this was the case with Lara Jennifer Moore’s superb study on the changes in archival classification throughout the nine-teenth century. The strategies of theoretical classification and control of the archive had achieved a “kind of sacred status in the archival community”, overlooking the political context in which these principles first emerged. 78 Viewing the French Revo-lution as the “defining moment in the history of archives and libraries”, archivists and historians have “given relatively little attention to nineteenth-century develop-ments”. 79 In her study Moore was able to demonstrate how the teleological narra-tive about the emergence of a definite principle of classification that would simply increase order in the archives was inaccurate, given that her careful reconstruction of the mission and approach of the École des Chartes shifted several times in response to changing governmental politics.

However the archival age of paper organisms was still concerned with the prob-lem of inclusion. This has changed dramatically with the emergence of digitally born data. We have entered an age of hyperbolic archivization. The main issue in the age of the Big Archive has now become exclusion, or, in other words, the attempts to create an-archival space beyond the excessive archive fever that tends to store com-munications in- and outside of what used to be the archival space in the age of His-tory.

The nineteenth century archive has allegedly become historical in the aftermath of the First World War ; however its notions of History survived in many ways, this cae-

77 Allgemeine Verordnung des Reichsinnenministers, September 17, 1935 [Deutsche Justiz (1935) : 1374], March 15, 1937 [Deutsche Justiz (1937) : 431] and August 11, 1939 [Deutsche Justiz (1939) : 1075] ; E. Reckert, “Der gegenwärtige Stand der Archivpflege”, Deutsche Justiz, 102 (1940) : 1348-1353. See also H. Pregler, “Neuere Aktensonderungsvorschriften”, Archivalische Zeitschrift, 42/43 (1934) : 242-259. See also D. Rupnow, Vernichten und Erinnern. Spuren nationalsozialistischer. Gedächtnispolitik (Göttingen : Wallstein, 2005) ; M. Wimmer, Archivkörper. Eine Geschichte historischer Einbildungskraft (Paderborn : Konstanz University Press, 2012), 283-287.

78 L. J. Moore, Restoring Order : The École des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870 (Duluth : Litwin Books, 2008), 108-109. 79 Moore, Restoring Order, 13.

the present as future past 183

sura might have only recently become ultimately obsolete. In a similar way the study of the nineteenth century has turned archival with some delay since the archive has worked in the mode of latency : on the one hand, bureaucratic documents are trans-ferred to the archive only with significant temporal delay ; on the other hand, legal re-strictions defer public access to archival materials for decades. However with the in-troduction of new media technologies what has long been considered the nineteenth century’s notion of History had already became obsolete during the last decades of the same century : “What writers astonished by gramophones, films, and typewriters committed to paper between 1880 and 1920 amounts, therefore, to a ghostly image of our present as future”. 80 This novel form of technological media implied a notion of historicity that was different from a linear history along the lines of the organization of writing. 81 In the age of film, the band of historical time could turn into a filmstrip that could rewind itself in a loop.

What will soon end in the monopoly of bits and fiber optics began with the monopoly of writing. History was the homogenized field that, as an academic subject, only took account of literate cultures. […] Otherwise, stories and histories (both deriving from historia) could not have been linked. 82

While archives today are already affected by the next revolution of media technol-ogy, many historians are still caught up in a nostalgic approach of historicizing and theorizing the nineteenth and twentieth century semantics of historical time. 83 To be sure : this certainly was and remains an important task, and after all nostalgia may be a perfectly legitimate mode of historical inquiry in this long moment of trans-formation – at least as long as the return (nostos) involves some passion if not pain (algos) and is thus more than a melancholic longing for a better past. But what are the alternatives ? Rather than submitting ourselves to the often deterministic mode of prehistory of a present moment, one might rethink the historiographical opera-tions of archival inclusion/exclusion as part of the project of an anonymous history of the present that links the “present to the past not as its inevitable outcome, but as the contingent product of changes in relationships of power”. 84 Only once we have traversed the history of the archive, we will be able to rethink the archive and its rela-tion to history. Otherwise we may continue writing about the past along the lines of a notion of History dangerously close to the nineteenth century state organism and its historico-political mechanisms of both imperial power and colonial hegemony and tieir-modeset in- and exclusion.

80 F. A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1999), xl.81 A. Kaes, From “Hitler” to “Heimat” : The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University

Press, 1989). 82 Kittler, Gramophone, 4.83 M. S. Roth, “Dying of the Past : Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth-Century France”,

History and Memory, 3 (1991) : 5-29 ; P. Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present. Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2004) ; P. H. Hutton, “Reconsiderations of the Idea of Nostalgia in Contemporary Historical Writing”, Historical Reflections, 39 (2013) : 1-9.

84 “Introducing History of the Present”, History of the Present, 1 (2011) : 1-2, 1.

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