Post photo: Archive | © Pexels on Pixabay
Quite atypically for my job, I was entrusted with staff work very late. On the one hand, it actually suited my nature quite well, but on the other hand it was rather counterproductive. Especially someone in management positions should know at least a little about staff work in advance. In retrospect, I know that you can also lead without one, but that this is not necessarily an advantage for everyone involved.
And no sooner had I later had my first experiences with staff work than I became aware of the existence of archives. There is no good staff work, administration and project management without archiving. And first of all, a backup or an extra-large e-mail account is not an archive!
And as soon as I became aware of the need for archives and their advantages, I immediately had to ask myself the question of how to archive classified information whose author is no longer known to anyone?
In the meantime I also know that there are archives for really everything — at least here in Germany and probably in the entire western culture. And I should look it up right away, because Joseph Henrich logically should have mentioned Archive in his book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. In any case, it can be said that everything that cannot be archived, or better yet, for which we have no archives, is not worth putting down on paper at all.
Sometimes you have to first inform the archives that your own documents need to be archived; helpful if you can refer to the relevant laws, decrees or regulations. And then it gets really exciting, because archiving is a science in itself and is ideally done by people who have also been trained for it.
It's always exciting to experience what you consider to be in need of archiving and what is actually archived. Even more exciting is what you don't consider worthy of archiving at all, but which literally makes every archivist's mouth water. That's why I came to the conclusion that it was agreed in advance that all documents should be handed over to the archive and that the archivists on site decide what ultimately goes into the archive.
As chairman of the association, I am currently dealing with two very different archives, on the one hand the Heilbronn city archive, which is the archive of the Freie Wahlervereinigung Heilbronn e. V. managed as stock D 158, and on the other hand with the Historical Archives of the European Union in Florence, who manage the archive of the EUROPA-UNION Heilbronn under the reference code EUHN.
This ensures that future generations can get their own picture of the voluntary work of both associations.
The sentence, probably by Jean Paul, that memories are the only possession that no one can take away from us, belongs in the store of impotently sentimental consolation, which would like to persuade the subject that the renouncing withdrawal into inwardness is precisely the fulfillment of which it drains. With the establishment of the archive of itself, the subject confiscates its own stock of experience as property and thus makes it something entirely external to the subject again. The inner workings of the past become furniture, just as every Biedermeier piece was created as a memory made of wood.”
THEODOR W. ADORNO, MINIMA MORALIA (14th EDITION 2022 [1951]: 189)
A well-managed archive is worth a great deal, since – as has already happened – unpleasant content can be made to disappear on a year-by-year basis. Subsequent generations may learn from it and maybe years later it will be reported again.
Where there are people, there is also people and mistakes happen. That's why professionally managed archives are so important. However, I have my doubts about party archives, which are at least partially managed by party-affiliated foundations.