Archive and Memory in German Literature and Visual Culture ed. by Dora Osborne (review)

The 9th volume of the Edinburgh German Yearbook expands the scope of how we think about post-1945 German memory culture by showing that our understanding of the archive is constitutive of how memory is constructed in the present and will be constructed in the future. Challenging Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s claim that archives and memory are not interconnected, the book’s editor, Dora Osborne, draws on Derrida’s Archive Fever to argue that memory is continually produced through a set of artistic and curatorial practices that draw on different concepts and materialities of the archive—and that reproduce, remediate, or invent it in the first place. In three sections devoted to visual art, film, and literature, the volume shows how the very notion of what constitutes an archive is continually shifting and is itself subject to processes of selection, control, and reproduction. While the volume’s focus on the “archival turn” in memory studies undoubtedly breaks new ground by presenting alternate, previously neglected lieux de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s sense, the sophisticated theoretical framework of the introduction is not always borne out in the individual contributions.

In the first section—on visual art—the photographic archives discussed seem to primarily focus on the aesthetics involved in the production of different types of archives. There is Priyanka Basu’s discussion of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographic archive of industrial post-war structures; “Anonymous Sculpture” in the Ruhr and Siegerland areas of West Germany; Simon Ward’s exploration of Janos Frecot’s photographic and curatorial work involving different sites in Berlin; Caitríona Leahy’s analysis of Anselm Kiefer’s obsessive self-archivizing impulse, which includes his former art studios as well as his Notebooks; and Dora Osborne’s analysis of Thomas Demand’s Nationalgalerie, which undermines the very concept of the “national” and its historical referent. It is noticeable that historical memory in the traditional sense seems to have been evacuated when we turn our gaze onto the archive of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of post-war industrial structures and their eerily beautiful and formalist aesthetics of a soon-to-be obsolete industrial past. The Bechers’ turn to the formalist beauty of industrial design, however, seems like an escapist rediscovery of an innocent gaze focused on an apparently neutral industrial landscape—a neutrality that might warrant a discussion of what layers of history are being screened out. As Osborne shows, Thomas Demand’s work resists visitors’ demand for an empirical historical referent in his photographic (re-)productions of turning points in German history. Yet it is not clear whether the assertion of artistic autonomy may—unintentionally—imply a troubling erasure of history, when in-depth historical context would be most helpful to visitors. In contrast to such evacuation of the historical referent, the documentary and referential function of photography is central to Ward’s discussion of Frecot’s documentation and remixing of Berlin urban history before the 1990s. Unearthing his photographic archive thus provides a different perspective on neglected aspects of Berlin’s urban history. Analogously, Leahy’s fascinating discussion of Anselm Kiefer’s expansive archivization of his own artistic legacy—which includes the preservation of his various studio spaces—offers a fascinating perspective on artistic self-fashioning, that is, on Kiefer curating how he would like to be remembered. What is striking is the minute control that Kiefer seeks to exert in crafting and musealizing his own genealogy as an artist, while asserting a quasi-monopoly on his creative virile powers that include somewhat annoying reflections on the mythic links between creative potency and male seminal (re-)production.

The second section focuses on different archival practices applied to the history of film production. Such practices are explored in Lizzie Stewart’s examination of Samdereli’s 2011 comedy Almanya—Willkommen in Deutschland; in Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann’s discussion of the role played by historical footage of the Nazi past...