Archival action: the archive as ROM and its political instrumentalization under National Socialism

Abstract

In German archival terminology, the term Akte (file) as the basic unit of storage corresponds with its actualization as discursive (re-)action: the word ‘acts’ can designate at once the content of what is to be archived and the archive itself (Derrida, 1995: 17). Whereas the network of Prussian state archives from post-Napoleonic Germany until the First World War figured as a non-discursive juridical Read Only Memory of internal autopoetic bureaucracy, the German Weimar Republic sought to develop a more democratically transparent archival information politics. This remained, however, for the most part an aspiration of the new political culture, and it was never systematically adopted by state institutions. By contrast, the National Socialist regime was the first to make use of archival memory in a partisan, active manner; Akten were actively instrumentalized as part of the programme for the annihilation of European Jewry. This article, based on the German state archives and also on a case-study concerning the ideologization of the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, examines archival micro-politics as the site of discursive repression and production, between the affirmation and the resistance of discretely segmented memory to holistic ideological demands.