Panel at GTW 2018 in Düsseldorf

Technik des Archivierens als Technik des (Re-)Produzierens

In November our project ‘Historiography -Ideology – Collection’ had the opportunity to organize an entire panel at the 14th Congress of the Society for Theater Studies “Theater und Technik” in Düsseldorf. This was a great occasion to close a busy first year in which we had a lot of presentations, meetings and research activities on our agenda. In the panel “Historiography -Ideology – Collection: Technik des Archivierens als Technik des (Re-)Produzierens” (Panel D2, see program) we offered a broad insight into the project thesis.  It was organized as a collective presentation with Birgit Peter (project leader), Louise Hartmann, Klaus Illmayer and Sara Tiefenbacher (project researchers) as speakers. Within the timeframe of one and a half hours we presented our techniques of archiving and archival processing as well as first outcomes and impacts of our research to a bigger audience. Moreover, the data model of our Archiv-TFM database and standards used for the archival description were illustrated. The techniques we presented, are – in our point of view – necessary for the investigation of theatre historical materials in the collection of the Archive of the “Zentralinstitut für Theaterwissenschaft” (1943-1945), as this collection deals with Nazi canonization processes. One technique that we presented at the congress, is to operate with predefined entities, such as record set, agent or place. These entities are described by properties. Thereby properties can be used to underline significant attributes of archival material or collection. They are especially relevant for theatre collections formed during the National Socialist era. As an example, we introduced the HIC-property “Stempel Zentralinstitut”. The seal “Stempel Zentralinstitut” illustrates and describes accessions of the collection and archive in the years 1943-1945. By means of this property (and other planned HIC-properties) a collection-related and ideological-critical description of archival materials and collections can be emphasized. In addition, one important part of our presentation was to visually demonstrate examples of controversial inventories of the collection. On several slides we exemplified three provenance issues, such as the historical photographs (see on top), which we introduced on slide No.13 of our presentation (all slides – unfortunately only in German – are available on Zenodo). These selected photos are just one example of questionable materials of the collection, we are confronted with. Thanks again to Mimmi Woisnitza for her remarkable and sensible moderation.

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