Brushing the Archive Against the Grain: The Politics of Remembrance in Eastern Europe

Cristina Vatulescu and Anke Pinkert’s studies join a growing body of art and scholarship that read Cold War police archives against the grain by connecting them with protest and dissent, complicating the traditional view of the archive as an institution that perpetuates the interests of state power. Both authors focus on the changes in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, including the large-scale opening of secret police archives, even as the two countries they work on—Romania and the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), respectively—differed considerably in the way they approached the memory of state socialism. And both add a new (and welcome) twist to the long-standing “archival turn” by treating the archive not as a static holding bay for recorded (official) history but as a dynamic chronotope whose appropriation by citizen demonstrators, artists, and scholars opens them up for alternative, even revolutionary perspectives that defy or complement official memory narratives.While Vatulescu’s Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges concentrates on the archives of Romania’s notorious Securitate, it is the author’s interactions with this archive that are the real focus of her study. The same is true to a lesser extent for Pinkert, who intervenes in strategically chosen parts of the book to remind readers of her personal motivations for researching post-1989 German memory culture. Such embodied perspectives helpfully work to tamper our expectations regarding a neutral or impartial analysis, as both authors develop their own elaborate academic paper chases. In Vatulescu’s case, the author’s embodied take on the archive is primarily that of a reader, whether she trains her eye on Securitate reports, photos, and drawings collected by agents and informants, or digital data. Sensitive to the way in which police archives mesh fact with fiction, Vatulescu suggests that readers trained in the humanities, and more specifically in literary studies, may be best equipped to analyze these records. Indeed, if in one sense her phenomenology of reading (in) the аrchive, and especially her many useful references to the way in which gaps, silences, redactions, and omissions—what is missing from the archive—structure how we interpret what is present, recalls Reader Response Theory, in another, it is close to the appropriations, by now quite numerous, of secret police files by Eastern European artists who have intervened in their Stasi records—with Gabriele Stötzer as one prominent example—or created their own alternative archives, as Polish artist Karol Radziszewski is doing with his Queer Archives Institute that assembles an alternative history of gay life in Communist Poland. Vatulescu, but especially Pinkert, not only draw on such counter-archives as illustrative examples, they effectively develop their own, hinting that “another archive” may be latently hidden within its manifest counterpart, and suggesting that opened police archives with their hundreds of thousands of individual surveillance reports can be approached not only as monuments to authoritarianism—this they surely are—but also as open processes that sharpen what the Austrian writer Robert Musil called Möglichkeitssinn, our sensitivity to open possibilities.Vatulescu develops her phenomenology of archival reading over five chapters. In Chapter 1 she discusses the file established by the Polish secret police during Michel Foucault’s 1958/1959 visit to the country. When in 1989 Poland’s state-socialist system collapsed, the archives of its security services, or what remained of them, were handed over to a government commission entrusted with the “prosecution of crimes against the Polish nation,” today part of the Institute of National Remembrance. Vatulescu’s focus on Foucault’s visit to Poland is hardly coincidental, as he is widely seen as the father of modern archive theory. In 1958, while writing his doctoral dissertation on the invention of mental illness, Foucault briefly settled in Warsaw, taking charge of a French cultural institute that had recently opened in the Polish capital. Less than a year later, he hurriedly left Poland, a fact that biographers generally attribute to his romance with a younger Polish man (“Jurek”) who, it turned out, worked as an informant for the secret police. Together with her co-author for this chapter, Anna Krakus, Vatulescu focuses less on solving the riddle of Foucault’s surveillance by the police—was he really spied on, or was he merely given the impression of being spied on?—than on the absence of any records that might provide the answer to this question. Closely modeling her approach on Foucault’s own (later) musings, Vatulescu and Krakus are interested in the hermeneutic value of missing information and absent files, the silence that gives contour and meaning to speech. In the process, what emerges is a shadow archive focused on rumor, innuendo, and gossip, and contributing to the “terrifying interpretive undecidability that defined life in police states” (62).Chapter 2, which broadens the scope of the archive technologies discussed to include film and photography, focuses on a 1959 bank heist and its bizarre instance in a 1969 film (Reenactment) produced by the Securitate itself, complete with the arrested suspects cast in the leading roles (in later years, Reenactment became itself the subject of two documentary films). Vatulescu uses this bizarre instance of remediation—with (film) images and photographs taking the place of written information—to remind us that there can be no archive without a material substratum or arkhé that is not external to the information it contains. In this chapter, as elsewhere in her book, the archive’s media, in the form of cropped photos, purloined files, or error-prone recording instruments, are of particular interest to the author. Focusing on one of the convicted suspects in the case—and the only woman—by the name of Monica Sevianu, Vatulescu confronts Reenactment with the files on which it is based, including reports by Sevianu’s cellmate about the latter’s daily routine and conversations with other conspiracists. If in one way, these reports represent an insidious example of the way in which control over the inmates was delegated through writing, in another, they suggest that personal police files such as Sevianu’s may be best approached as instances of what Bakhtin referred to as “polyphonic” writing, by which he meant novels (Dostoevsky’s) that kept a number of parallel narrative viewpoints in the balance without conspicuous authorial intervention. This is Vatulescu’s perspective—she finds the reports by Sevianu’s cellmate “revealing and gripping”—as she tries to find ways of reading these files as literature, against the grain of their authoritarian provenance. Not surprisingly, she is disappointed by the film Reenactment, as the cinematic enactment of Sevianu’s files replaces the immediacy of the cellmate’s account with a strongly hierarchical narrative structure, with the state prosecutor at its center.Here as elsewhere in the book, the “other archive” is a function of aesthetically sensitive reading that creatively scours archival records for information that exceeds their stated purpose and whose decipherment requires methods, especially literary and artistic, that go beyond the historian’s. The “other archive” correlates with what I have referred to above as Vatulescu’s (and Pinkert’s) insistence on the archive’s essential openness, the idea that archival records, contrary to their stated functions within the hierarchies of state power, can point to alternative—including revolutionary—historical outcomes that retain their relevance in the present.Chapter 3 considers side by side the plot by the Securitate to frame Nobel Prize–winning author and member of the German-speaking minority in Romania, Herta Müller, and her early fictional writings (also in her file) that the writer used to process her gruesome personal encounters with the agents of the Securitate. Again, Vatulescu approaches Müller’s file like a literary text, complete with rewarding nods to the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, and reminding us that archives and administration—in short, bureaucracy—have been a major inspiration for twentieth-century literature. In this chapter, Vatulescu approaches the secret police and its informants as a veritable Schreibmaschine whose principal goal was to encourage the production of texts, be it by putting pressure on their victims—like would-be informer Herta Müller—to write about themselves, or, if they refused, to write on their behalf. Vatulescu here again makes good use of what is missing from its archival place—in this case, the beginning of Müller’s file. Prompting an elaborate paper chase, the missing beginning prompts some very revealing ruminations about the way Securitate files were composed and the administrative logic behind such composition. As Vatulescu knows well, archives do not just consist of records; they also include systems for sorting, arranging, and inventorizing these records, and detailed knowledge of such procedures is a necessity for any aspiring archivist. Vatulescu provides an impressive example of such a system in her fourth chapter, where she shows the cover of Herta Müller’s file, including its accession number (I 233477, vol. 1, ACNSAS), which in turn helps her connect Müller’s file to other records via the conversations between one of the informants and their supervisor: “Often the most interesting part of the file is not the description of the subject which tends to be formulaic . . . but rather the dialogue between the reporting and the supervising agent” (145).The Securitate archive functions like a medium where what was being said is often less of a clue than the techniques for saying it, techniques that are themselves a form of archival enforcement that includes reporters, supervisors, and victims alike—echoing Foucault, who shrewdly observed that anything we may find in an archive was produced with the archive already in mind. The concluding chapter of Reading the Archival Revolution traces the history of the expression “Iron Curtain,” which has become synonymous with the Cold War, through EastView databases, which have made all the archives from the Soviet Press beginning in 1917 publicly accessible. With this chapter, Vatulescu balances her focus on significant individual files—Foucault, Müller—with a question without which no archival phenomenology would be complete: how to deal with the overabundance of declassified Cold War archives with which we are confronted today, and which does not preclude, it must be added, continued archival scarcity and inaccessibility in some regions and countries.Anke Pinkert’s Remembering 1989: Future Archives of Public Protest shares some fundamental premises with Vatulescu’s book—especially an interest in the opening of Cold War police archives and the way they have affected the way we view state socialism—although its author places more emphasis on the role (Stasi) archives have played in post-1989 (German) memory politics. As Pinkert notes, post-1989 official memory culture in post-unification Germany has tended to instrumentalize the Stasi archive as a “truth machine” used to prop up a now-canonical narrative of inevitable “liberation” and “democratization” that tends to cast the GDR as little more than a prison house whose inmates have finally been able to become free citizens. In this scenario, the rupture that was 1989 is reduced to a conduit for the introduction of the values of liberal democracy and consumerism, with the state-socialist past functioning as the gateway for a status quo that crowns a national history that began with the foundation of the German Reich in 1871. In this view, public museums and archives devoted to the events of 1989 and the GDR—including the Stasi archive—focus on narratives of trauma and oppression and on the replacement of socialist internationalism with neoliberal globalization. By contrast, Pinkert compellingly argues for an understanding of the revolution of 1989 as something akin to what with Walter Benjamin we might call Schwelle, a threshold that widens (swells) to accommodate complexity, contradiction, and conflict, and that opens the possibility that the “Peaceful Revolution” of 1989 can be embraced, in all its complexity and contradictoriness, as a rupture that harbors within itself the possibility of a different outcome—for example, the reformed socialist society that some of those who protested in the streets in 1989 had in mind. Pinkert’s book gestures toward such an “archive of the future” that she locates in (art) projects that, unlike official memory culture in Germany, insist on the past’s openness. In five chapters, she outlines her vision for this archive of possibility based on material traces of GDR activism from the period around the fall of the Berlin Wall. Throughout, Pinkert rejects the idea of the East German population as passive and the idea of 1989 as a “failed” revolution. The archive she theorizes is liminal, dispersed, and performative, and closely connected with the activities of the New Forum (Neues Forum) founded by peace movement members Bärbel Bohley, Jens Reich, and others.1Like Vatulescu, Pinkert reads Eastern European archives against the grain; however, while in Vatulescu’s case, these readings watch out for blind spots and double binds in the records themselves, in Pinkert’s, the term archive, apart from referring to the now openly accessible Stasi archive, additionally includes official memory architecture, public monuments, and a variety of minor memory sites that are shown to shape, each in their own way, 1989 revolution’s afterlife, and that include media technologies such as film and photography. Both authors acknowledge—as anyone working on twentieth-century Eastern European history would—the connection between archives and (state) power that is so central to Foucault, while also insisting, as Foucault never did, on power’s media-technological and institutional specificity. Both Pinkert and Vatulescu look for, and find, in Eastern European police archives records of stories that were never part of these archives’ official mandate, yet they differ on what to make of their findings. Where Vatulescu sees the real of the Securitate archive in the incompatibility between its records and truth—the archive records the biographies of its victims based on bureaucratic procedures that are structurally and aesthetically mismatched for what they are charged with capturing—in Pinkert’s account, the archive is less a (misfiring) “writing machine” than a mediated memory effect whose official mandate—to represent the events of 1989 in a teleological and ideally heroic manner—is a stretch for the series of tumultuous events without recognizable victors or victims that was the Wende.In the first chapter, Pinkert discusses the memory politics of Germany’s reinstated capital, Berlin, based on three post-1989 memorials: the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse, the Monument to Freedom and Unity next to the reconstructed castle of the Prussian Kings (now the Humboldt Forum), and the Pillar to the Peaceful Revolution in its shadow. Regarding the Berlin Wall Memorial and its configuration, Pinkert shows how down to minute architectural details, Germany’s official commemoration of the GDR and, more specifically, the 1989 Wende, are inextricably linked to the country’s fixation on how to deal with the legacy of the Holocaust. Indeed, by virtually conflating the two and by evoking the architectural “grammar of voids” that is a hallmark of so many Holocaust memorial sites, the Berlin Wall Memorial successfully, if implicitly, casts the citizens of the GDR as the hapless victims of a murderous regime, a strategy that in its turn denies specificity or complexity to the events of 1989. In this scenario, the Wall becomes of a of so to all of for which there are only passive victims without and where there is no for to 1989 with other events in German twentieth-century history can be seen in the Pillar to the Peaceful Revolution Berlin where 1989 is as a of the East German effectively the of the 1989 to a the chapter, the author traces the which are as in down the GDR regime, to the peace that place at the from and which were in the of and peace This helps Pinkert the view, in Germany today, that the GDR was from the with the Berlin Wall as the most of such to Pinkert, connecting 1989 with a view of the GDR as a society with the to the revolution from its of As is the with Vatulescu, her book, her with archives and archival media such as Pinkert to read events against the grain of established as if to open in that or the latter’s continued openness. 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