Archives of Thought

The Austrian-American literary scholar and writer Ruth Klüger, who, as a young girl, was deported with her mother to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz-Birkenau, recounts in her autobiography »Weiter leben. Eine Jugend« (1992) her coming of age as a Jew in Austria and Germany during the time of National Socialism, as well as the conditions of her survival and continued existence. Before she could think about her own weakness during the hours-long roll calls, she spent the seemingly endless time silently reciting poems, thereby creating a poetic counterbalance to the senseless and destructive chaos of her tormentors. Her accumulated wealth of literacy also proved life-saving as a measure of reassurance, for it can be understood as a strategy to maintain a respectful self-concept in a place of dehumanization. To keep her own thinking machine running, Ruth Klüger thus developed thought figures that she preserved in her archive of thoughts, imperceptibly arranging them for outsiders.

Physical archives, too, which store knowledge and documents, initially present themselves as places of locked doors, endless corridors, and anonymous boxes, where the voices of the past merge with the future and only reveal themselves after a certain time. Insights then come forth and coalesce, often through the search process that demands endurance and finesse to bring seemingly unrelated things together and create correspondences. In essence, the researcher also operates according to a similar principle: that of serendipity – a principle of searching and finding where chance comes to aid and surprising discoveries arise because documents suddenly lie next to each other as if on a set table. Aby Warburg speaks in reference to his library of a system of good neighborhood, whereby it is not necessarily the book one was looking for that provides crucial insights, but rather the one that happened to be "accidentally" nearby. However, this accident only occurs when the mind is prepared for it. For this reason, it requires knowledge of the organizing logic of common classifications and a willingness to develop the resulting reference system of the collected and sought after.