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  • Missing Paul Robeson in East BerlinThe Spirituals and the Empty Archive
  • Todd Carmody (bio)

You may well ask why Paul Robeson means so much to our people. Why do we have a Paul Robeson committee or a Paul Robeson Archive? Why do our school children learn about him and why is he an inspiration to us on our road to communism? I am not sure that I have the whole answer to these questions. But surely one reason is what we learned from the terrible experiences under fascism.

—Frank Loeser, President of East Germany’s Paul Robeson Committee, Ansprache zur Veranstaltung “What Is America To Me,” August 2, 1973, 19:30, Kosmos Theater

In 1965 East Berlin’s Academy of the Arts established the Paul Robeson Archive, honoring a prominent African American singer and activist who visited the German Democratic Republic on but three occasions. Robeson traveled to the GDR twice for state ceremonies in 1960 and again for medical convalescence a few years later. Each of these trips was brief, and during his final stay Robeson saw no visitors and made no public appearances. East Berlin may thus seem an unlikely site for the Robeson Archive; Robeson’s ties to the socialist German state were not especially strong and never as well established as his links to Britain or the Soviet Union, or even to other Soviet satellite states. But surprising though its location may be, the collection amassed by the East German Academy of the Arts is extensive. Among the academy’s holdings are a handful of private letters and candid photographs, audio outtakes and reading notes—ephemeral traces of an everyday life shaded from the glare of international celebrity. Personal artifacts like these, comparatively rare in the Robeson collection, lend the past a comforting sense of familiarity. They encourage us to imagine the archive qua cultural institution as a space in which distant histories are rendered immediate and where we might, taking the singular object in hand, better grasp the lived experiences of those who have [End Page 1] come before us. The romance of the archive is this promise of proximity. As Carolyn Steedman writes, “You think, in the delirium: it was their dust that I breathed in” (19).

Most of the academy’s holdings, however, offer no such intimacy. The archive in Berlin might best be described, in fact, as a transatlantic paper trail. More bibliography than reliquary, it contains thousands of photocopied newspaper articles, scholarly essays, and popular books. These documents are generally about rather than by Robeson, and most duplicate materials readily accessible elsewhere. While a few of Robeson’s personal papers and belongings made their way to East Berlin, most of the materials were obtained by diligent archivists and administrators tasked with tracking down anything and everything written about Robeson.1 Founded not by bequest but by request, the Robeson Archive is thus awash in photocopies and offprints, desk copies and microfilms. The sheer volume of secondary materials gives pause. Why would the cultural arm of the East German government go to such lengths to commemorate an American dissident who was often invited but rarely visited? What purpose could an archive of photocopies serve?

Internal memos suggest that preservation and pedagogy were guiding concerns from the start. Claiming in the mid-1950s that “reactionary imperialist forces” were endangering Robeson’s legacy, for example, the board charged with “Founding a Committee to Create a Paul Robeson Archive” declared the urgency of “collecting and evaluating the entire documentary record of his achievement” before it was too late (Konzeption).2 As Victor Grossman, director of the archive from 1965 to 1968, would later recount: “The Robesons had been targeted by cold war hatred and racism in the United States, and this archive was meant as a rejoinder” (2003, 176). Initial proposals also called for materials in the archive to be made widely available. Citizens of East Berlin and the environs could visit the collections in person; school field trips were an especially high priority. Genossen in other parts of the country were to be reached with traveling exhibitions and museum loans. In each of these instantiations, the archive would seek to “objectively document” the...

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