Investigating the Archive: Perspectives on a Historical Teaching Project and its Outcomes

Riley Linebaugh and Bettina Severin-Barboutie

Archives do not always provide answers to questions about migration. Sometimes they remain even completely silent about it, be it that nothing has been handed down to them or that which has been handed down has been destroyed or disappeared. At the same time, archives assemble, categorise and catalogue migration in different ways. Investigating the archive as we did in the course we taught, which led to this Archival Guide, is therefore crucial when working on the memory and history of migration.

What is an archive? What processes make, re-make, and un-make archives over time? What are the relationships between archives, history, power, and politics? These were some of the questions we posed during the seminar “Archives: Gatekeepers of the Past?”, which we taught in winter 2020/21 at Justus Liebig University (Giessen, Germany). Students’ ongoing reflection on the archive gave rise to the publication Gatekeepers to the Past? An Archival Guide, which is freely accessible here.

Over the course of the term, we endeavoured to teach the archive by investigating the practices, peoples, and politics of preservation. We began by discussing the historical development of professional archival practices. For example, what forms did the (co-)development of archiving, nation-building, and citizenry take? The result of this investigation makes up the first chapter of the Guide, “The Astonishing Career of the Archive.” Authors Celine Rosalie Derikartz, Isabella Sophie Pianto and Filip Emanuel Schuffert offer an impressive historical account of different episodes in archival history, paying close attention to socio-political developments from the Aegean civilization to European imperial expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Secondly, we explored how archival practices shape(d) history. How have records been kept and preserved? How have these practices in turn facilitated surveillance and other forms of state control? And how have these same records served as evidence against repressive regimes and, at the same time, supported liberation struggles? Working through these questions, we framed archives not only as generative of history writing, as a “fabrique de l’histoire” as Étienne Anheim and Olivier Poncet called it in 2004¹, but also as historically situated and contingent, and thus as an object of historical inquiry. Linda Heintze explores these characteristics extensively in the second chapter, “Keep(ing) the Archive Dynamic.” Her assessment focuses on the inherent dynamics of archives and the power dynamics in which they are situated. The question of power (power to select, preserve, control, and use records) recurs throughout the guide, but is addressed in detail in the third chapter, “Archives and their Actor Networks”. In an analytical actor-network approach, authors Marie-Luise Schreiner and Mónica Páez-Sierra examine how social hierarchies both shape and are shaped by archives.

Thirdly, we discussed the underlying values of the archive and its current challenges. What are the values of an archive and how can they be evaluated? In what way does the digital challenge the archive?Authors Louisa Schulz and Lara Stoller point to financial markets that determine how archives are funded and thereby function. This, they show, is related to but distinct from the collective memory and democratic values enabled by archival access. They conclude with a discussion on appraisal, or the assessment of records for permanent conservation, and draw attention to the material conditions that prefigure preservation. By doing so, the authors remind us that not everything can be preserved. In the final chapter, Ron Heckler and Xenia Fink discuss the limits facing archives and archivists by turning to the digital and the affordances and challenges digitalization presents to archival practice.

We see the guide as a living document and hope that its existence will be dynamic: as a teaching tool, a basis for discussion, a guide to thinking with the archive. Our commitment to the topic has not subsided since the course, and both archives and our understanding of them have continued to evolve. We have held discussions, for example, on archival pasts, presents and futures in relation to epistemologies, decolonization and (dis-)placement.²

We would like to tackle the dynamics triggered by migration in the making of the archive in the same vein. In recent years, archives have become more and more concerned with the lack of archival documentation and preservation pertaining to migration and have therefore begun to generate and actively collect evidence about and from migrants in order to render migration more visible in the present and for posterity. The spectrum of collected items ranges from written documents and other items to oral traditions such as oral history interviews and music.  Various cities in Europe have even gone so far as to launch projects that ensure documentation of their own – urban – migration history. For example, the city of Munich has played a pioneering role in the Federal Republic with its project “Migration bewegt die Stadt”. Elsewhere, new repositories have been created or are in the process of doing so. A few years ago, the city of Salzburg, in cooperation with the University of Salzburg and the Salzburg City Archives, set up a “migration archive” in the House of City History, where material on migration in Salzburg is collected and stored in order to preserve migration and, at the same time, make it visible.³

Whether these documents will be used one day as sources for the future (re)construction of history remains to be seen, since we can neither dictate to the future what material should be used to reconstruct history, nor how this material should be interpreted, as aptly pointed out by Lisa Regazzoni.⁴ Use and interpretation of the documents is therefore left to the future, or, to quote the Canadian archivist and archival scholar Terry Cook, “What is past is prologue”.⁵ However, the documents invite us to think critically about their making, preservation and accessibility in relation to the future making of history. 

Riley Linebaugh is Lecturer and Researcher in British History at the Centre for British Studies. Before joining the Centre in January 2023, Riley obtained her PhD from Justus Liebig University, Giessen and held a position as postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. She specializes in the history of British colonial archives.

Bettina Severin-Barboutie ist Professorin an der Université Clermont-Auvergne und ist zugleich assoziiertes Mitglied in dem an der Universität Straßburg angesiedelten Forschungsverbund “Arts, civilisation et histoire de l’Europe”. Ihre Arbeitswerpunkte liegen u.a. in der Geschichte von Mobilität und Migration, der Kolonialgeschichte und Dekolonisierung, der Stadtgeschichte und Populärkultur sowie in der Geschichtstheorie. 1990s.

1. Etienne Anheim, Etienne Anheim, Olivier Poncet, “Fabrique des archives, fabrique de l’histoire”, Revue de synthèse, 2004, Vol. 125 (1), 1-14. [↩]
2. https://calenda.org/1028092. [↩]
3. Bettina Severin-Barboutie, Migration als Bewegung am Beispiel der Städte Stuttgart und Lyon nach 1945, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, 2019, 2-3 [↩]
4. Lisa Regazzoni, “And If History Were to Turn Its Back on the Future? A Thought-provoking Interjection,” Geschichtstheorie am Werk, published 28.06.2022, URL : https://gtw.hypotheses.org/6870 [7.12.2022]. [↩]
5. Terry Cook, Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Archivaria, 1997, 17-29, here 17. [↩]

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