Archival Bodies

My current book project Archival Bodies. A Cultural History of Historical Knowledge, picks up on what 19th and 20th century German archivists called “archival bodies” (“Archivkörper”) to trace an ensemble of conceptual, metaphorical, and material traces that was literally embodied in the formative years of modern archival and historiographical theory and practice from the late 1880s to the 1930s. In the first section I describe the German-Austrian debates on archival terminology (“Archivberufssprache”) in international context and its relations to archival practice as well as to the writing of history.

The second section shows how many dimensions in the world of archives, the historical profession, and the historical imagination figured in the 1926 trial of Karl Hauck, a well-known historian, who was accused of the theft of thousands of archival documents. When the case was pressed and documented by the distinguished German archivist Heinrich O. Meisner, Hauck began to confess to an unusual passion that literally fetishized archival documents. The interplay of professional and perverse uses of the “archival body” allows me to dissect the mostly implicit rules and practices of archival work and their relation to the logic of the historical imagination.

This brings me in a third section to what I call the “archival unconscious” of enabling assumptions and techniques shared by archivists, the guild of historians, and the founding figures of the modern discipline of history. In close readings of the writings and experience of Leopold von Ranke and Jules Michelet I develop an account of the historical imagination suggesting how modern historiography emerges not only along the archival grain but also along the boundaries between absence and presence, detachment and immersion, “life” and “death.”