Thomas Radford Medical Illustration Collection

Rylands Blog

We have recently completed a cataloguing project on our medical archives, generously funded by the Wellcome Trust under its Research Resources in Medical History programme. In her final blog post, archivist Ginny Dawe-Woodings writes:

Thomas Radford (1793-1881) trained as an apprentice to his uncle, a surgeon attached to the Manchester and Salford Lying-in Institution, a maternity hospital. This first-hand experience with obstetric patients inspired Radford to become one of the nineteenth century’s eminent obstetricians, and gives him a proud place in Manchester’s rich medical history.

Before the eighteenth century, the care and treatment of pregnant women in Europe was an almost exclusively female pursuit which rigorously excluded men. The presence of a male doctor at a birth was a rare event, and only occurred when the midwife had exhausted all normal means of managing a complicated delivery. Having men deliver women of their children was seen as offending female modesty…

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‘Here Beginneth Cytology’: John Peter Smith and the Development of the Cervical Smear Test

Rylands Blog

Ginny Dawe-Woodings, Wellcome Archivist, writes:

The recent acquisition of John Peter Smith’s papers on the foundation of the cervical cytology unit in Manchester has triggered interest into the origins of cervical smear testing in the UK.

Sir John Williams first identified the lesion that would eventually be known as carcinoma in situ of the cervix in 1886; however, cancer has been described since Egyptian times, and both Hippocrates and Galen recorded it in their patients, and Paul of Aegina (c. 600AD) diagnosed and treated the disease cancers of the uterus. However, it would not be until the development of microscopes and histology that diagnosing and effectively treating cancers could be achieved.

The pathologist Walter Schiller was the first to propose the term “pre-invasive carcinoma”, but it would be George N. Papanicolaou’s contributions which would have a profound impact on cervical cancer diagnosis. Papanicolaou discovered, courtesy of a willing (female) hospital…

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Biography: Ambrose King

Originally posted on STIs in East London in the 20th Century:
The Ambrose King Centre was established in 1929 by the London County Council (LCC), and came to be known as the Whitechapel Clinic. It is a department which specifically…

“Everything starts from a dot” – The Development of Art Movements in Late Imperial Russia and in Soviet Russia

Russia’s artistic legacy is of Imperial Tsarism, industrial Communism and of some of the finest and most unique art, theatre, literature and architecture in Europe. When the Revolution began in 1905, it marked not only a political change but also a change in Russian culture. It acted as a catalyst for reordering and modernising a country which had severely lagged behind the rest of Europe for most of its existence. The artistic movements which were already in existence in the Imperial era emphasised elitism and elegance. Following the revolution though these had adapted and modernised or perished. While the rest of Europe was experiencing a Fin de Siècle or Belle Époque, Russia too was undergoing a similar transformation referred to as their ‘Silver Age’ which embodied the history of art, philosophy, aesthetics, and literary criticism[1]. This era was at its height when revolutionary philosophies seeped into artistic movements, and when the Revolution transpired it became obvious that more than politics had changed. Indeed, there were few new artistic movements after 1918 that could not trace their roots back to Silver Age ideas.

The later Imperial years, from 1860 onwards, marked a dramatic change in artistic thought and expression. Russia was experiencing a steady stream of social development, an increased emphasis on education was seen, and whilst being run mostly by the church, witnessed literacy rates rise from 6% in the 1860s to an estimated 28% by 1913[2]. This was also an era where Russia produced eminent contributions in science and maths, such as Lobachevsky, Pavlov and Mendelev. Social sciences too became more prominent, History in particular became a well studied field as Russian academics explored their national historiography. Fine art during the first decade and a half of the 20^th Century was divided between artists seeking to continue celebrating traditional styles, and those seeking to express the progressive bold new styles. John Bowlt suggests that artists became desperately aware of the “fundamental displacement of social, ethical and cultural values”, exacerbated by the 1905 uprisings, and they fled from a “mundane reality” into an etherial and unorthodox world[3]. Bowlt goes on to suggest that another reason for returning to traditional natural art was the fear and intrigue caused by Russia’s rapid industrialisation. However the decadence of the Imperial era was drawing to a close and for a brief final period Russian art lacked a purpose or reason[4].

Symbolism was a short lived movement, but developed highly emotional and spiritual pieces of work expressed mostly through poetry. Early symbolists, such as Vladimir Solovev expressed close connections to nature, and his successors, such as Aleksandr Blok would build on the principles of nature and country to write poems about Russia and nationalism. Blok would span pre-Soviet and post-Soviet genres, and the maturing from futility to utilitarianism in art movements. Peter France highlights how Blok’s works conclude with a sense of hope, unexpected joy and resurrection[5], not only being inspired by his country but also being influenced by the revolutionary ideology. Symbolism though reached its climax around 1905 and spawned a progeny in the form of the Acmeists. Whilst the Symbolists had sought to imply and infer through metaphors and allegories, the Acmeists favoured unambiguous imagery and emotions in their writing. Poets such as Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam flourished in the movement, and Blok too adapted to the new style. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal argues that the downfall of symbolism was its cryptic nature, and highlights that whilst they were trying to influence the Russian people, even artists had difficulty understanding one another’s work[6]. Symbolism emphasised the elitist nature of a lot of art from the start of the 20^th Century, with a lack of accessibility for the proletariat, with many of the poems written seemingly accepting a revolution as the next symbol.

Another of these ‘decadent’ movements appeared in architecture in the form of ‘style moderne’, a cousin of Art Nouveau. The principles of Art Nouveau are organic, natural and creative design and applied mostly to architecture and graphic design. William Brumfield’s article on anti-modernism points out that the movement came about following a shift to urbanisation, but was primarily intended for Russia’s bourgeoise[7]. As an artistic movement it was criticised as being ‘aristocratic aestheticism’ but also because critics, in particular the Mir Iskusstva, saw it as a threat to Russia’s traditional buildings and design. This led to the counter movement of neo-classicism which favoured classic designs and icons over the modernity of style moderne. Paradoxically the Neoclassical movement was responsible for more urban development than style moderne ever did, and was responsible for buildings such as the Moscow State Pedagogical University (built 1910-1914) and many large apartment buildings in the capital.

The Realism and Classicism that had been the trademark movements of the 19^th Century were at worst in their death throws and new movements like the Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art Movement) actually rejected realism. They acted as a prominent force for artistic change in the pre-Revolutionary era, through a collection of revisionist artists and a magazine which publicised their philosophy. A. Benois initiated the movement as a means to counter the modern and pro-Positivist themes in art which they saw as lower artistic standards, their philosophy being ‘Art for Art’s Sake’[8]. Despite a large following the magazine became unpopular for its approach to art criticism, with articles attacking specific artists and accusations of foreign influences damaging Russian styles[9]. The movement saw art as a force for educating the masses, with morally or socially uplifting subjects, and supported by national identities. They welcomed traditional subjects, in traditional media: illustration, painting and writing. It particularly promoted folk art and handicrafts, hoping that the Russian population would value them over the ‘mass-produced commercialised’ art[10].

However, no amount of historical nationalism and retrospective art could prevent revolutionary philosophy from infiltrating movements following the 1905 uprisings in Russia. Whilst the political revolution had failed the educational revolution was underway, with the years following the uprisings being the years that Russian modernism would flourish. The national art history that Benois had craved was slowly developing, in contradiction to his ideals of outright traditionalism. Modernism and futurism were the new favoured styles, as they too had changed to address more social themes.

Neo-primitivism was an evolving style. It bridged the divide between the Mir Iskusstva school of thought and the futurist style, embracing traditional folklore subjects and expressing them through modern painting. Natalya Goncharova’s (1914) image of a woman in peasant costume expressed no attributes of Realism and lacked in finesse, similarly Malivech’s 1912 painting ‘Morning in the Village after a Snowstorm’ demonstrated a highly stylised cubist interpretation of a traditional scene.

‘Morning in the Village after a Snowstorm’ – Kasimir Malevich (1912),

In comparison the ultramodern Futurist movement whilst defined as ‘Russian Futurism’ was ultimately a facsimile of the Italian Futurism outlined by Filippo Marinetti’s ‘Futurist Manifesto’ from 1909. The principles were outlined as: “anarchical vitalism, defiant rebellion against ‘passiesmé’ in the arts as well as in society, and confidence in the achievements of technological civilisation”[11]. Marinetti’s vision manifested itself primarily in Russian literature and poetry. Writers such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky embodied the spirit of futurism in the writings. Marinetti’s concept embraced technology, and the Russian writers developed their own ‘transrational language’ or ‘zaum’ which used onomatopoeic words to convey sounds and mechanisation[12]. Khlebnikov’s poem ‘The Grasshopper’ uses “zingzinger” and “ping” to express noises. In comparison to the romanticism of Pushkin and the realism of Dostoevsky, the futurist poets showed a progression and modernity, and a want for change.

‘Red Rayonism’ – Mikhail Larionov (1913)

Rayonnism was a visual development of futurist ideas by Mikhail Larionov in 1911. Whilst abstract paintings are the ideas and reactions to a subject Rayonnist artists used bold colours and brush strokes to evoke not the object but the “rays emanating from the object”[13]. Similar in style and subject to Italian Futurist paintings artists depicted modernity, speed and technology. Larionov saw Rayonnism as more than an artistic style or a fashion, but “literal renderings of physical and philosophical fact”[14]. In comparison to Realist style or ‘style moderne’ which promoted literalism and inanimateness, Larionov’s movement embodied modern themes of the era: speed, light and space. Suprematism was a similar movement started 1915-1916, and pioneered by Kasimir Malevich which built on Larionov’s principles of linear simple compositions, but reduced this subject and focused on basic shapes and forms[15]. ‘Yellow Quadrilateral on White’ (Malevich, 1916-1917) and ‘Black Square’ (Malevich, 1913) are key examples of the simple style of painting and even the titles of the paintings imply a minimalist and functional approach to the art form. Charlotte Douglas argues that Suprematism directly turned its back on the Symbolist philosophy of reason and purpose[16], instead its simplicity actually represented nothing and was the creation of a new reality, and in many ways represented Russia: as a new and fresh system. Suprematist paintings were the direct opposite, both aesthetically and philosophically to the detailed and literal works of Realist artists such as Repin.

Bowlt hypothesises that the Silver Age was an incredibly confused era in art history, which he argues derived partly from the fact that the Russian Silver Age was an extremely varied, contradictory and elaborate phenomenon”[17]. The era demonstrated a transition in Russian art. From the classical Realist paintings of Repin; to the traditionalist revival of the neo-primitivists; to the antagonistic Futurists. The years between 1905 and 1908 marked a turning point for the art movements of Russia as the implications of the 1905 uprisings began to sink into artistic philosophy. As the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, there was drastic political and social upheaval. This was not just a move for the future though, as new traditions were quickly established, religious holidays were replaced with new holidays[18] and Russia’s history began to seem archaic and bourgeois. And the revolution did not stop in October 1917, as the Civil War continued from October until 1923. However, the revolution was not necessarily a catalyst for change within the art movements. Many of the seeds of revolution and modernity had been sewn a decade earlier. Early Soviet artists had already decidedly rejected the old styles, and were then seeking to use the new space to further their new movements.

The revolution had political and social ramifications, the proletariat worker became highly valued. Their significance was shown in the Proletkult movement which encouraged art ‘about the people, by the people, for the people’. The Proletkult was funded and controlled by the Bolshevik régime, with the intention of creating artless classless art which was universally accessible[19]. Initially, there was a Pluralist society which welcomed creative development. A problem which arose out of this was anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism. Whilst before the revolution art had been mostly free of political influence, now it was critical to developing art. In many ways Anti-intellectualism became an artistic style in itself, by promoting its own philosophy of anti-authority and anti-heirarchy in art. One poet wrote: “Destroy the churches, those nests of gentry lies; Destroy the university, that nest of bourgeois lies; Drive away the priests, drive away the scientists! Destroy the false gentry and bourgeois heavens”[20]. This led to a heightened sense of class consciousness, and an aggressive anti-elitist crackdown as Soviet era progressed artists came under pressure to conform to new – arguably more Soviet – styles. Peter France examples Anna Akhmatova and explains that she continued to write about the same insecurities as in her earlier work, however the Central Committee of the Communist Party found her work ‘anachronistic’ and had her work censored[21]. Formalism too was a style which came under attack in the Soviet era. It was a movement which grew out of the principles of Futurism, embracing the modernist subjects and styles but demanded a more coherent and erudite format. To those who valued class equality, Formalism was a style which embodied an outdated technique and demanded an educated audience.

Agitprop was one of the few new movements in the post-revolutionary era. It used pamphlets, plays, cinema, and the fine arts to simply and ideologically address the working proletariat. This was partially as a result of being influenced by the Futurists, but also because literacy was still incredibly low. The Bolsheviks still needed to maintain influence over their population and the best way to express this influence was at a basic graphic level.

Vladimir Mayakovsky Agitprop poster, “Want it? Join” (Date unknown)

Another emerging style was Constructivism which took its basis from earlier Futurism. It was a movement which used the same geometric shapes, lines and bold colours as the Futurists but their philosophy conformed more to the Soviet demand for a utilitarian approach to everything, this included art. However this created divisions between artists, particularly in the Constructivists who debated utilitarian purpose in their work and whether it was an ‘organising principle’ or an ‘aesthetic function’[22] and combining and balancing them to create a composition. Constructivism started and developed the first true Russian ‘machine age art’, rejected easel paining, but most significantly embraced functionalism and utility and so quickly expanded into more utilitarian purposes. Contemporary critics had seen the art produced by the movement as literal design prototypes and the main proponents soon found themselves designing fabrics, clothing, furnishings in the tone of Russian industrialism[23]. It was a highly influential style which penetrated all aspects of Soviet society in a way that previous movements had been purely aesthetic and artistic, as Bowlt highlights there was no “Cubist architecture, no Symbolist chairs, and no Realist dresses”[24].

Fashion was one of these branches, and the Constructivists found their style created clothing which was “simple, cheap, hygienic, easy to wear, and industrial”[25]. Liubov Popova was one of the key designer of the era. Her lack of institutionalised artistic training was quintessential of the era, being made by the proletariat and free of any ‘elitist’ influence. Povova’s designs shared the Suprematist’s use of simple geometric shapes, however her canvas was the body and relied on the compositions ability to hang off the body. Whilst previous artistic movements had been either in the 3D form of sculpture, or 2D form of painting, the Soviet interest in fashion applied the 2D principles to a 3D surface.

Architecture was another of the 3D developments which saw aesthetic changes by Constructivism. As with the rest of their work functionality became paramount, with the aim being to unite living, working, and recreational spaces[26]. The beacon, quite literally of the Constructivist architectural movement was the Shukhov Radio Mast in Moscow. The essence of Constructivism was modernity, and their ability to apply their philosophy to all every day media meant that the Constructivism artists effectively designed the revolution.

The Shukhov Radio Mast in Moscow

At the same time the fine arts had in no way been forgotten or replaced. The descendants of Futurism, in the same way as the Constructivists, had utilised the new open space for artistic development and media. However the Constructivists’s utilitarianism was a minor part of the new Futurist movement. Suprematism continued into the early Soviet years continuing to create 2D artwork of a wholly aesthetic nature. Other branches of Futurism spread into literature and music expressing the industrial and mechanical themes which had previously only been expressed in paint. Arseny Avraamov’s ‘Symphony of Factory Sirens’ used ship sirens, vehicle horns, fog horns, factory sirens and artillery to create a cacophony of industrial tones. There was also the development of ‘conductorless’ orchestras, created partially due to a lack of skilled conductors in post-revolutionary Russia but also the belief that conductors “prevented good musicians from expressing their artistic individuality”[27].

Futurism was not just about the artistic style but also about the new media. Cinema became a new form of artistic expression. Though as new media was developed their was an realisation by the régime that the media should be utilised to promote their Bolshevik ideals. Sergei Eisenstein’s films ‘October’ and ‘Battleship Potemkin’ acted as propaganda for the state, as highly idealised interpretations of history.

Another pre-revolution movement that saw a comeback was Realism. Now a movement that had been highly influenced by the Proletkult and modernist styles, Socialist Realism was a state promoted artistic style. In place of the elitist archaic style was now a modernised propaganda tool, aimed at “realistically” portraying proletariat life. The Worker Correspondence movement combined journalism with creative writing established a ‘proletarian literature’[28]. In the visual arts too, the proletariat was central. Painters depicted three things: portraits of political or military leaders; historical paintings; and ‘genre’ paintings depicting production lines, collective farming, and domesticity[29]. The post-revolutionary years were political designed to create a new Russia, and whilst the artistic movements were nothing revolutionary, they helped shape the new era both philosophically and aesthetically.

When comparing the movements of both pre and post revolutionary Russia there is a clear progression from Classicism to Modernism, but only at the polar ends of each era. Late Imperial art enjoyed traditional subjects and styles, portraying decadence and archaism. As revolutionary philosophies seeped into the Russian consciousness, there was both an advancement in art but also several movements established to protect the themes of Imperial art. The Mir Iskusstva movement backlashed against the modernism of art, whilst the Neo-primitivists attempted to combine the traditional and the Positivist in their art. However, the Futurist movement best represented their contemporary Russia. The Silver Age then witnessed he most significant change in artistic styles and when the revolution of 1917 came around, much of the revolutionising had already happened.

The art of the early Soviets differed greatly from the art before 1905. The biggest change in society was the militant Collectivism, exhibited by the Proletkult. Great emphasis was placed on industrialism and the proletariat. There was a disappearance of the individual from art in favour of the masses. There was also the development of agitation in artwork, as movements were encouraged to evoke revolution and change. However as Soviet Russia grew, there was a greater stress to conform, and the radical art of 1917 to the late 1930s was lost to Stalin’s cultural control.

Ginny Dawe-Woodings BA MA

1. Nicholas V. Riasanosky, Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia Since 1855 Volume 2 (2011), p. 444
2. Ibid, p. 442
3. John E. Bowlt, ‘Neo-Primitivism and Russian Painting’ in The Burlington Magazine (1975), Vol. 116, No. 853, p. 134
4. Ibid, p. 94
5. Peter France, Poets of Modern Russia (1982), p. 54
6. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ‘Nietzsche in Russia: The Case of Merezhkovsky’ in Slavic Review (1974), Vol. 33, No. 3, p. 437
7. William C. Brumfield, ‘Anti-Modernism and the Neoclassical Revival in Russian Architecture’ in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (1989), Vol. 48, No. 4, p. 371
8. Tamara Talbot Rice, A Concise History of Russian Art (1963), p. 248
9. Stuart R. Grover, ‘The World of Art Movement in Russia’ in Russian Review (1973), Vol. 32, No. 1, p. 33
10. Ibid, p. 36-37
11. Anna Lawton, ‘Russian and Italian Futurist Manifestoes’ in The Slavic and East European Journal (1976), Vol. 20, No. 4, p. 407
12. Ibid, p. 409
13. Tamara Talbot Rice, A Concise History of Russian Art (1963), p. 262
14. Charlotte Douglas, ‘The New Russian Art and Italian Futurism’ in Art Journal (1975), Vol. 34, No. 3, p. 233
15. Tamara Talbot Rice, A Concise History of Russian Art (1963), p. 262
16. Charlotte Douglas, ‘Suprematism: The Sensible Dimension’ in Russian Review (1975), Vol. 34, No. 3, p. 280
17. John E. Bowlt, ‘Through the Glass Darkly: Images of Decadence in Early Twentieth Century Russian Art’ in Journal of Contemporary History (1982), Vol. 17, No. 1, p. 94
18. František Deák, ‘ The AgitProp and Circus Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky’ in The Drama Review: TDR (1973), Vol. 17, No. 1, p. 47
19. Leo Pasvolsky, ‘Proletkult: It’s Pretensions and Fallacies’ in The North American Review (1921), Vol. 213, No. 785, p. 539
20. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, Richard Stites, Bolshevik Culture (1985), p. 15
21. Peter France, Poets of Modern Russia (1982), p. 63
22. Briony Fer, ‘Metaphor and Modernity: Russian Constructivism’ in Oxford Art Journal (1989), Vol. 12, No. 1, p. 19
23. Catriona Kelly, David Shepherd, Russian Culture (1998), p. 143
24. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, Richard Stites, Bolshevik Culture (1985), p. 205
25. Ibid, p. 203
26. Catriona Kelly, David Shepherd, Russian Culture (1998), p. 144
27. Leonid Sabaneev, ‘A Conductorless Orchestra’ in The Musical Times (1928), Vol. 69, No. 1022, p. 308
28. Jeremy Hicks, ‘Worker Correspondents: Between Journalism and Literature’ in The Russia Review (2007), Vol. 66, No. 4, p. 585
29. Catriona Kelly, David Shepherd, Russian Culture (1998), p. 146

Family History: My Great Grandmother, Honor Cattigan

I often think it is easier to explore the histories of others, and whilst I enjoy genealogy I have deliberately shied away from delving into my own family history. I briefly toyed with various websites and censuses but too often found myself searching out parts of the family puzzle and forcing them to fit instead of letting pieces slip gently into place. Consequently much of what I know has been passed down word-of-mouth to me from grandparents and distant cousins.

Of course everybody is proud of their family, and finds them uniquely interesting, and I won’t pretend that I don’t share any of this [self-centred ness]. That being said, I have always been proud to talk at great lengths about the members of my family and  I wanted to write a series of posts about them. As pointed out earlier, genealogy websites are not particularly my style, but I am the very lucky owner of my family’s archive. I have two large airtight plastic boxes crammed with photographs, letters, interviews, bibles, and all the other ephemera that families love to keep for future generations. I thought I would start with one of my favourite set of items – the postcard collection kept by my Great Grandmother Honor Cattigan.

Honor Cattigan (Russia, 1906)

This is Honor Cattigan, she is my great-grandmother on my maternal side. I know very little about my grandmothers early life. I don’t know when she was born other than that I assume it was in the late 1880s or early 1890s. I have assumed that she grew up in or around Glasow or Paisley area in Scotland, as most of my grandmother’s family did. Her early life is, as far as the family archive is concerned, was fairly unremarkable. As she reacher her late teens and early 20s her life become a lot more interesting, or at least I find it to be.

Honor worked as a cotton worker, manufacturing cotton spools in the UK. Eventually she was selected to travel abroad to teach other workers the same manufacturing procedure. First she was sent to Italy and then to Russia. Throughout her travels she kept postcards and photos of the places she visited and the friends she made. Honor kept postcards from Rome, Milan, Florence and Lucca.She ended up being based in Lucca. Honor was a devoutly Catholic woman and many of the postcards feature photos and illustrations of cathedrals, churches, monasteries, relics and ruins. They shine a beautiful light on her faith and adventurous spirit.

Here is a ticket from the communion she took at a mass in Lucca.

I have always assumed she met her future husband James McGough before her travels. I know they married in April 1914 and there is a postcard from James to Honor whilst he was living in Baltimore and she was based in Lucca in 1908.

After her time in Lucca she moved with the company to St. Petersburg, Russia, where she lived with the other female employees. Here is the receipt for her Russian passport from 1912.

They stayed at a house called Mackenzie Cottage, shown here in a postcard photo. It is also important to note that my grandmother had her hands on this material long before I did and took, clearly with great glee, to labelling various elements of the photographs with blue biro.

And below is Honor with her colleagues and friends in St. Petersburg.

Like her time in Italy, Honor kept a collection of postcards that leave a trail as to where she visited and what she saw during her time in Russia. One of my favourites is the photograph of her and two of her friends at the beach. My grandmother has labelled it as the shore of Finland, although I’m not sure how she was able to know that.

I love their dresses and Honor’s brolly. Honor also kept more touristy items, like her collection of postcards featuring Russian occupations and their traditional dress. She has pictures of postmen, newspaper sellers, military people, Cossacks, and the ‘people’ and policemen show below.

Her collection also brings to life pre-revolution Russia. Judging by her letters I believe she returned to Scotland before April 1914, as that was the month she was wed. This may have been a coincidental action, to return to her family and soon-to-be husband, although political and military issues that were bubbling up around the Balkans and the Russian empire may have also driven her out of Eastern Europe. As a consequence of being there pre-war and pre-revolution she has several postcards that feature the Russian royal family and their palaces. The postcards also contain pre-revolution language which features additional and different characters.

Another of my favourite postcard photos features a well-dressed couple in a photography studio, my grandmother has penned the name ‘Mr and Mrs Neary’ on the reverse. The photo is fairly inconsequential but the story behind the people in it has always enchanted me. I suppose every family has stories, more likely myths, associated with certain members of their family. One of my family’s is that we are descended from the Irish pirate queen Grace O’Malley based on the fact that the surname O’Malley can be traced so far back; although I conclude this to be tenuous genealogy at its best, the story is always pulled out at family gatherings or to anybody who might listen!

The story associated with this photograph is to do with the woman seated. The story goes, as my grandma would tell, is that the seated woman was one of Honor’s closest friends and Honor introduced them to one another, they fell in love, and were married in the French Chapel in St. Petersburg. This woman was one of the governesses to the Romanov family children. Whether it is true or not it has always captivated me.

The final artefact that I would like to include in this post is by far my favourite. It is a handwritten knitting pattern (that I am yet to try) written on ‘St. Petersburg Express Line, S.S. Imperator Nikolai II’ stationery. It tells me so much about her. It shows me her beautiful handwriting. It tells me how she travelled: The St. Petersburg Express Line was a a passenger and cargo service which ran (at the time my great grandmother was travelling) between London and St. Petersburg; and I would assume that she would have travelled via this service to probably return home. It tells me she enjoyed knitting, something I am yet to master, but am more keen than ever to recreate this pattern.

Going through my great grandmother Honor’s documents made me feel connected to her. Despite never knowing her in person I know what she looked like, some of the family stories she would no doubt have spread (regardless of their authenticity), and I know some of her hobbies and that she had friends that spanned countries. Mostly though, I know that the experience she passed on to my grandmother who then passed on to my mother who then passed on to me has been ingrained in the female family psyche of adventure and fascination, and probably hoarding looking at the sheer quantity of material in the family archive.

Ginny Dawe-Woodings

Feminism and women’s history resources

Brunel Special Collections

A post by Ginny Dawe-Woodings, Special Collections placement student.

Brunel University recently celebrated a week dedicated to Feminism, set up by the university’s Feminist Society to encourage debate and understanding of the ideology.

An advert from the Ladies Home Journal

In Special Collections I took some time to explore our own collections and create an exhibition of pieces that illustrate women’s history. Special Collections houses a set of The Ladies Home Journal, an American magazine published from the 1880s to the present day. It was the Cosmopolitan of the day and offers a very visual insight into women’s history. We have issues dating from 1939 to 1961. A regular feature in the magazine was an article entitled ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?” which advised women on how to fix their marriages.

These extracts are taken from issues from the 1950s, they place the responsibility of a good marriage entirely with women:

“The…

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‘The Up and Down Lines’ – a Railway Mission Pastoral Poster

Brunel Special Collections

A post by Ginny Dawe-Woodings, Special Collections placement student.

My job as placement student in Special Collections at Brunel University has focused around a map listing project. Most of the maps are railway maps, part of the Transport History Collection, many in black and white, and there have been many photocopies and multiple editions. So when I came across a brightly coloured, cartoon style map I was delighted and a little surprised. In amongst a selection of original maps of tramlines and railways in Wales I found a map entitled ‘The Up and Down Lines’ which depicts railway and pastoral scenes, with references to passages of the Bible. The poster is a brightly coloured pastoral setting, featuring scenes of farming, horse racing, railways, and industrial buildings. Each scene is accompanied by a map reference, for example there is a boxing match scene (by the horse racing) which is labelled…

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The Political Picture – How the Nazis Created a Distinctly Fascist Art

It is not easy to define what it takes to make a ‘distinctly fascist’ artistic style when it is difficult enough to identify what makes fascism itself ‘distinctly fascist’. Stanley G Payne defines fascism as embodying certain, not exclusive, typographical descriptions: anti-liberalism; anti-communism; the creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state; goals of empire or of revolution; the creation of an idealist, voluntarist creed, normally involving the realisation of a new form of modern, self-determined secular culture; emphasis on a romantic and/or mystical aesthetic; extreme stress on masculinity and patriarchy; and national unity.[1]

George L. Mosse argues for fascism as a ‘civil religion’, a non-traditional faith which uses liturgy and symbols to make its belief come alive,[2] and that fascist aesthetics need to be put into this framework. Ulrich Schmid’s explanation is that fascism can be understood as a total work of art where each element fits stylistically and so not only the artistic aesthetic but also styles of behaviour, clothing and even speech are basic manifestations of the fascist reality.[3]

Each pre-Second World War fascist regime sought to create its own particular over-arching aesthetic, incorporating many of the above characteristics, to help shape public attitudes. The Nazi version was all-encompassing: militaristic symbolism and dress; architectural style and embellishment; and all aspects of art: theatre, film, sculpture and painting.

Schmid argues that there is a widespread cliché identifying fascist aesthetics with monumental neo-classicism,[4] and Nazi Germany did largely come to fit this stereotype. However, as demonstrated in Italian and Spanish fascist aesthetic movements, fascism could also experiment with Modernist ideas such as futurism and cubism that had become anathematised in Germany.  The early 20th century had seen Modern art flourish in the USA and Europe, including Germany. However following Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the shame and humiliation associated with its surrender, many Germans, and not only those who supported the NSDAP, turned against anything seen as liberal or foreign.[5] The German population began to look inwards, favouring art that celebrated parochial and provincial life: a new aspiration but ultimately a return to their roots.

Even in the conservative artistic climate of the time, very early Nazi art briefly brushed with elements of modernism: Willy Engelhardt’s 1933 election poster (Figure 1) used a Bauhaus-style building to create a visual metaphor for Hitler’s ‘modern position,[6] while in the same year Goebbels unsuccessfully attempted to integrate what he called ‘Nordic Expressionism’ into the official Nazi art movement. He failed because he was unable to overcome Hitler’s own preference for monumental classicism,[7] the style that would ultimately define Nazi art.

(Figure 1) Willy Engelhardt – Poster for German Elections, ‘Hitler Builds Up’ (1933)

After coming to power in early 1933, the Nazis used the threat of Modernism to ignite the debate over the National Socialist kulturpolitik and how to manage cultural policy.[8] Kurt Karl Eberlein commented: “This [modern] art is still ‘culture’, hence uncomfortable, alien to the people. The fault lies neither with the state nor with the individual, but with that art which is cut off from blood and soil”.[9]  Modern art became associated with chaos and foreign liberalism; a style to be despised; and was labelled with some of Nazism’s favourite pejorative adjectives: ‘degenerate’, ‘Bolshevik’ and ‘Jewish’.[10]

Within the favoured style of classicism, Nazi art emphasised several key themes and subjects which broadly accorded with Payne’s typography. The idea of ‘Blut und Boden’ (Blood and Soil), first propounded by 19^th Century agrarian romanticists, and given greater impetus after the First World War by the likes of Shultz-Naumburg and Darré,[11] was a romantic idea both of an idealised re-adoption of rural values and, perhaps more importantly, of a mystical link between the German people and their homeland: of national unity. The romanticism was often emphasised by the use of mythological imagery, almost exclusively Greek and Nordic. The non-mythologised human form was also explored, not only the literal physiology but also as a metaphorical embodiment of health and strength. Militarism and male dominance were prominent themes, as was family life, often depicting strictly defined gender roles.

(Figure 2) Adolf Wissel – ‘Farm Family from Kahlenberg’, (1939)

This division of gender roles is exemplified in Adolf Wissel’s ‘Farm Family from Kahlenberg’ (1939) (Figure 2), a portrait of a seemingly idyllic Aryan family. The father appears behind the rest of the family casting a somewhat detached but domineering eye over his brood, a grandmother knits, children play and, at the centre, the mother comforts the youngest child.  A clear vision of a patriarchy with women subordinated by the prevalent ‘kinder, küche, kirche’ ideology. Adam explains that “If man was shown as the dominator of nature, woman was represented as nature itself”.[12]

Payne identifies romanticism and mythology/mysticism as elements that help develop an idealised creed or culture. Karl Alexander Flügel’s ‘Harvest’ (1938) (Figure 3) depicts the idyllic life of country folk working in a perfect landscape and evokes not only a bountiful land but a hardworking population; echoing the ‘blood and soil’ agrarian ideal. It reflects the same allegorical arcadia seen in Caspar David Friedrich’s works from a century earlier and is representative of a return, in both content and style, to the original neo-classicist landscape painters. Werner Peiner’s ‘German Soil’ (1938) (Figure 4) and Julius Paul Junghanns’ ‘Hard Work’ (1939) (Figure 5) also have a similar romantic focus on the German countryside and the people living there.  Even the titles of the pieces hammer home the Nazi ethos.

(Figure 3) Karl Alexander Flugel – ‘Harvest’, (1938)

(Figure 4) Werner Peiner – ‘German Soil’, (1938)

(Figure 5) Julius Paul Junghanns – ‘Hard Work’, (1939)

In ‘Rewards of Work’ by Gisbert Palmié (1933) (Figure 6) the idealised real world of ‘Harvest’ is extended to introduce elements from mythology. The central Aryan female character bears a superficial similarity to Botticelli’s Venus but she is now surrounded by an idealised agrarian idyll. While echoing classical style, the emphasis has moved from the celebration of a mythological or entitled elite to celebrating rural and pastoral artisans.

(Figure 6) Gisbert Palmié – ‘Rewards of Work’, (1933)

Alfred Rosenberg himself highlighted the importance of Greek mythology to the Nazi aesthetic, saying that “The Nordic artist was always inspired by an ideal of beauty. This is nowhere more evident than in Hellas’s powerful, natural ideal of beauty”.[13] Adolf Ziegler’s works the ‘The Four Elements’ (1937) (Figure 7) and ‘Judgement of Paris’ (1939) (Figure 8) extend the use of mythology still further, being full depictions of ancient Greek myths in a romantic classical style.

(Figure 7) Adolf Ziegler – ‘The Four Elements’, (1937)

(Figure 8) Adolf Ziegler – ‘Judgement of Paris’, (1939)

The communication of values and messages by allegory and metaphor was important but high value was also placed on representations of fitness and wellbeing, as characterising racial purity and superiority, the Aryan ideal. The identification of the naked man with the ideal of classical beauty and heroism was a ubiquitous sentiment in National Socialist art and popular culture. Hubert Wilm stated: “Representation of the perfect beauty of a race steeled in battle and sport, inspired not by antiquity or classicism but by the pulsing life of our present-day events”.[14]

Artists were encouraged by the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts to attend courses in gymnasiums and sport complexes to improve their life drawing. This helped develop a specific style of drawing, far removed from drawings of ‘real life’, which concentrated on nude studies of virile and sturdy models in strong or sporting poses: every element of the human form needed to impart strength, discipline and force.[15] ‘Sports of the Hellenics’ and ‘Olympia and the German Spirit’ were popular exhibitions aimed at promoting the bond between athleticism and art.  The 1936 Berlin Olympics was an opportunity not only to showcase Germany’s sporting prowess and superiority but also to create art. Leni Riefenstahl’s film ‘Olympia – Feast of Nations’ (1938) fades between shots of ancient sculptures and sports men and women, binding contemporary life with classic forms and traditions.

Amongst the best examples of the human form in Nazi arts were the sculptures of Arno Breker whose works echoed the works of classical Greece and Rome. Paintings such as Ivo Saliger’s ‘Diana’s Rest’ (1940) (Figure 9) depict the human form as athletic and wholesome. Many paintings are romanticised in their visualisations of humanity: Leopold Schmutzler’s ‘Farm Girls Returning from the Fields’ (1937) (Figure 10) and Oskar Martin-Amorbach’s ‘The Sower’ (1937) (Figure 11) show hard-working, healthy and active characters embracing their everyday tasks.

(Figure 9) Ivo Saliger – ‘Dianas Rest’, (1940)

(Figure 10) Leopold Schmutzler – ‘Farm Girls Returning From the Fields’, (1937)

(Figure 11) Oskar Martin-Amorbach – ‘The Sower’, (1937)

The German population became idolised in statuary and on canvas. As with much fascist art the images did not necessarily represent reality but an idealised, even exaggerated version of it. All authoritarian regimes wish to inspire and reinforce feelings in their populations: in this case the message was that, under the NSDAP, the German people were healthy and strong: past, present and future. The naked human form held no fear for the Nazis, provided it was attractive, healthy, and Aryan.

This concept of a fit, healthy people sat well with the idea of eugenics promoted by the Nazis. Ziegler’s ‘Judgement of Paris’ (1939) (Figure 8), while a representation of an episode from Greek mythology, can also be interpreted as a narrative for this eugenics sentiment. The mythical tale of Paris picking the most beautiful from three goddesses: Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, reflects the high value placed on Aryanism and human aesthetics in real life as well as in art. Judgement of the goddesses based on their beauty is a visualisation of the selection of partners in Germany. Again, art is being used to subtly influence German culture and thinking.

Health and strength, along with masculinity and patriarchy, were also glorified through militarism in art.  Women were subordinate; men in comparison were expected to support and defend their country. The ‘warrior’ became a key figure, embodying persistence, victory and a fierce jingoism. Militarism also gave a visual representation of the Nazi philosophy that there existed a perpetual ‘struggle’ between races which could only be solved by armed conflict: the superior race being the victor.

Conrad Hommel’s ‘The Leader and Commander in Chief of the Army’ (1940) (Figure 12) highlights this respect for the ‘warrior’. The full length portrait of a uniformed Hitler standing in a powerful pose does not endear the subject to a viewer, it is intended to emphasise strength and develop emotions of respect, admiration and gratefulness: this is a leader fighting for Germany and her ideals in difficult times.  Emil Scheibe’s painting ‘Hitler at the Front’ (1942) (Figure 13) similarly shows Hitler as a military leader; supporting his soldiers; willing them to victory.

(Figure 12) Conrad Hommel – ‘The Leader and Commander In Chief Of The Army’, (1940)

(Figure 13) Emil Scheibe – ‘Hitler at the Front’, (1943)

Mosse’s ‘civic religion’ concept also informs Nazi aesthetics and artwork. Whilst paintings tended to be devoid of overt references to traditional religions (other than anti-Semitic messages), they often used similar styles and methods to historical religious artworks. Symbolism and iconography were popular, as well as the use of triptychs and friezes. The repeated use of the hakenkreuz, eagle and totenkopf in paintings, as well as throughout wider society, echoed the cross or the nimbus of traditional religious symbolism. All of this helped create a quasi-religious aesthetic.

Arthur Kampf’s ‘Der 30 Januar 1933’ (1939) (Figure 14), commemorating the Nazi seizure of power, emphasises Swastika emblazoned flags and the Nazi salute alongside the triumphant scenes of marching SA Brownshirts beneath the Brandenburg Gate. This conveys and reinforces so many fascist messages.

(Figure 14) Arthur Kampf – ‘Nazi Seizure of Power’, (1938)

(Figure 15) Hans Schmitz-Wiedenbruck – ‘Workers, Soldiers, Farmer’, (1940)

Hans Schmitz-Wieden’s triptych ‘Workers, Soldiers, Farmer’ (1940) (Figure 15) also brings together several of the key artistic motifs and messages of the Third Reich. The larger centre panel shows representatives of the three branches of the military whilst, either side, are miners and a farmer at work. The triptych format echoes religious works, as does the iconography of the Swastika, but the clear message is that, while all activities are important, they are there to support the most important: those fighting for the Reich.

The creation and veneration of martyrs to the cause also existed in the Nazi ‘religion’: the ultimate example being Horst Wessel, an SA Sturmführer killed in 1930. Most famously commemorated by the “Horst Wessel-Lied” which became the NSDAP anthem, effectively Germany’s joint national anthem, his image became ubiquitous in photographs, posters and more physical memorials.

Developing a fascist aesthetic to support a political philosophy demands that it is widely disseminated. The Nazis created museums and galleries; various art magazines such as ‘Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich’ were published; miniaturisations of famous paintings appeared on stamps, cigarette cards and postcards; films such as Riefenstahl’s were praised internationally; statues placed in parks and town squares; the swastika was everywhere. 1937 saw the first ‘Great German Art Exhibition’, where works by painters and sculptors such as Wissel and Breker were displayed alongside those of original neo-classical painters like Casper David Friedrich, defining a continuum of what was distinctly ‘German art’. These exhibitions drew vast crowds which would praise the art not just stylistically but also for its content.

Having created the means of disseminating their favoured aesthetic, the Nazi regime accentuated that aesthetic by denigrating and banning that which did not fit: artworks they called ‘Entartete Kunst’ (degenerate art) which included work by communists, Jews, foreign artists and other undesirables. Otto Dix, Marc Chagall and Max Ernst were all excluded: even Max Liebermann, the president of the Prussian Academy of Arts, was denounced by the far right in the 1930s. This was not entirely down to the content of his art, which focused mainly on the peasantry and the working class, but because of his “indebtedness to foreign models, his internationalism, [and] his rejection of ideology in art”.[16]  The ‘Degenerate Art Exhibition’ was mounted in 1937 to contrast with and identify a clear divide between the acceptable fascist, German art of the ‘Great German Art Exhibition’ and unacceptable ‘degenerate’ art.

Compared to the fascist art of Italy and the Socialist art of Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany’s art demonstrated its own rather conservative, traditionalist individuality. Italian fascist art embraced elements of modernism such as futurism and took a progressive approach. Soviet art also toyed with Modern styles such as cubism and impressionism and, while it favoured Socialist and Heroic realism as generic styles, it was less restrictive and critical of other artistic movements. Nazi art on the other hand had regressed to a neo-classical style popular a century earlier whilst at the same time excluding, even banning, other artistic styles. Katya Mandoki argues that the art of the NSDAP was unique because of six substitutions: “the substitution of religion by the instrumentalisation of art; the substitution of art by propaganda; the substitution of propaganda by indoctrination; the substitution of culture by monumentalism; the substitution of politics by aesthetics; and the substitution of the aesthetic by terror”.[17]

Within its unique conservative style Nazi art was purposeful, with content chosen less for aesthetic appeal and more for usefulness in the ‘bigger political picture’.  It achieved much in terms of embodying and communicating the wider fascist ethos of the NSDAP: reinforcing its back-story of a pure race and a country with both a mystical past and a great future, a ‘thousand-year Reich’, that would be delivered if the people believed in the ‘quasi-religious’ values of Nazism – military and moral strength together with an intolerance of weakness, liberal values and, above all, the evils and degeneracy of communism and Judaism. It is interesting that the art created was so distinct and clear in its message, such a quintessential fascist aesthetic, that almost seventy years later the material is still something of a taboo with many authors putting disclaimers in their work when discussing Nazi art, seeking to avoid condoning the content.

1. Stanley G. Payne, ‘Fascism as a ‘Generic’ Concept’ in Aristotle A. Kallis, The Fascism Reader (2003), p. 84-85
2. George L. Mosse, ‘Fascist Aesthetics and Society: Some Considerations’ in Journal of Contemporary History (1996), Vol. 31, No. 2, p. 245-246
3. Ulrich Schmid, ‘Style versus Ideology: Towards a Conceptualisation of Fascist Aesthetics’ in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions (June, 2005), Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 128
4. Ibid, p. 129
5. Ibid
6. Ibid
7. Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (1996), p. 19
8. Kurt Karl Eberlein, Was ist deutsch in der deutschen Kunst? (Verlag E. A. Seemann,1933) referenced in George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture (1966), p. 165
9. Peter Adam, The Art of the Third Reich (1992), p. 35
10. Ibid, p. 29
11. Ibid, p. 150
12. Ibid, p. 24
13. Ibid, p. 64
14. Ibid, p. 179
15. Peter Paret, German Encounters With Modernism 1840-1945 (2001), p. 200
16. Katya Mandoki, ‘Terror and Aesthetics: Nazi strategies for mass organisation’ in Renaissance and Modern Studies (1999), Vol. 42, No. 1, p. 65

The New Temples to Mnemosyne – Have Archives Undermined Memory?

“[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

– Socrates (Recalling what King of Egypt Thamus says to Theuth
following Theuth’s demonstration of the invention of writing) [1]

The Titananess Mnemosyne; the Greek personification of memory. (Mnemosyne, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, 1881)

In the Western tradition writing is the exalted form of communicating human thought. Yet it was this same form of communication that King Thamus in Plato’s Phaedrus was convinced would make us forgetful and only offer a semblance of truth.

Archives underpin many of society’s functions – accountability, efficiency, evidence, and the creation of cultural and national narratives and identities. This paper will consider that latter function – if archives are now the constructors of memory, have archives like writing, in Socrates’ words, made us forgetful and, in this sense, have archives undermined society’s memory?

Archives have a complicated relationship with memory. Archival institutions – houses of writing – have claimed to “be”, “contain”, “inspire”, and “support” memory: conversely memory has been said to be “found in”, “contained by”, and “created by” archives.[2] Steven Roger Fischer argued that writing and recording is rooted in human beings’ fundamental need to store information for communication, be it immediately or in the future.[3] Laura Miller suggests a likening between the processes of creating, storing and retrieving memories and the way archives capture, preserve and make available records and archives.[4] Many of the world’s cultures built systems around this principle and where archives find their place in society – as repository stores for this ‘information’. Records, for the most part, represent a tangible form of communication. In contrast oral traditions and the recalling of memories are intangible and fluid in their transmission making them essentially un-archivable.

One of the major ongoing debates in archival science is whether the primary role of the archive is to support evidence or to support memory. Terry Cook examined the various archival paradigms and how they have developed over time to reflect societal trends and expectations. Originally the focus was on the evidentiary nature of archival collections and their use in supporting accountability, but this has now shifted to an identity and community oriented focus.[5] Community and identity paradigms put less emphasis on the authenticity and reliability of records and more what they mean to people personally.

It is important to assess why archivists claim such a bond with memory. Etymologically there is a strong connection between records and memory – the word ‘record’ derives from the Latin recordari combining re and cord to mean to recall ‘by heart’. To record was originally the process of committing to memory, and memory was the capacity for remembering.[6] For a long time archives have monopolised the term ‘memory’, claiming to support, be and create it. There is a prioritisation of an archival interpretation of memory over individual memory and recollection. This comes down to the common conception that tangible primary source material is more valuable as evidence than intangible recollections. In 2012 it came to light that the government had hidden 1.2million sensitive documents in a secret archive in Hanslope Park, in what was deemed to be a sacrilegious attack on data protection laws. Some of the documents related to atrocities during the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya during the. However it wasn’t only the blatant illegality of the secrecy that was disturbing –  the fact that the government bodies sought to hide these documents demonstrated an assumption that the victims would have no ‘evidence’ or ‘proof’ based on their memory alone; that individual testimony would not be trusted by itself. Josias argues that the implications for giving or denying legitimacy to past events is when the tension between written and oral sources is often most visible.[7] Trying to combine memory and evidence has historically been a problem for example oral traditions, seen in Aboriginal societies, were only accepted as legal evidence in Canada as recently as 1998.[8] In this sense archives support memory, but only their own archival formulated memory. As Terry Cook argued, “[w]ithout reliable evidence set in rich context, memory becomes bogus, false, wishful thinking, or is transformed into imagination, fiction, ideology.”[9] Archives argue they support memory but really they seek to validate memory, finding comfort in ensuring that memories are true.

Archives’ claims that they ‘are’ or ‘can be’ memory are complex. Memory is an inherently personal practise,  unique to what created it, so how can archives claim to control the intangible? Memory is not an unchanging vessel for carrying the past into the present; memory is a process, not a thing, and it works differently at different points in time.[10] Instead of archives claiming to ‘be’ memory, perhaps a better term would be ‘to perpetuate memory’. Isabel Allende claimed that “[d]eath does not exist; people only die when we forget them” and this is perhaps another case where archives support and perpetuate memory.

An individual’s memories can only exist whilst they are alive – in oral traditions what failed to survive in an individual’s memory or be passed on died forever. People’s memories, their own internal records, must have been their most treasured, but most fragile, possessions.[11] Archives are able to ensure that memory, or at least traces of memory, can exist beyond the life of the memory creator. As Jeffrey Wallen puts it, “[o]ur identities are also woven for us, and the archive is the loom.”[12]

A seal discovered in the 1850s led to the discovery of the ancient Indus Valley civilisation. It is suggested that deforestation and a series of invasions contributed to the decline and eventual obliteration of the civilisation.[13] As a consequence of this there is no ‘memory’ of the civilisation, only physical artefacts that need interpretation. This poses the question of what happens when there is evidence but no memory? People can choose to forget – individually or collectively. Whilst it is now recognised that records are products of society and the multitude of structures, biases, systems and agendas that accompany said society, and there is acknowledgement that what has been recorded has been recorded for the purpose of posterity,[14] it is still the intention of archivists to impartially keep records of all history. This can be seen in the Canadian ‘Total Archives’ project – the concept of collecting, or at least attempting to collect, “all aspects of historical development, seeking the records not just of officialdom or of a governing elite but of all segments of a community.”[15] Wallen argues that archival material is imprinted by bureaucracy, that which has been institutionally preserved – “traces of the dead, evidence of the past that has been recorded but not (yet) brought into the public space of the published book, of the library or museum.”[16] Much as the Indus Valley seal connects the present with a lost civilisation, archives connect the present with lost or forgotten individuals and memories. Immortality can be found in the archive.

Within Terry Cook’s community paradigm of archival focus it is clear that archive users want to find their place in their community – to construct a personal identity that also connects them to their surrounding society. Here there is a debate about who’s heritage, or who’s memory is held in archives – the individual or the collective, the elite or the marginalised. The community paradigm also begs questions about formats in archives – oral vs written traditions. For the most part archives privilege what Cook and Schwartz call “mainstream, white, European – North American, logocentric, text-based” archival records[17] over oral testimony, community archive projects, and other non-traditionally created records. As these fall outside the traditional archival boundaries they are often branded as makers not of evidence, but of memory. There is an active movement in archival science to supplement current holdings with oral history projects and other collecting projects that are aimed creating a more ‘complete’ history and memory of various communities.

Many archival processes and theories are underpinned by the life-cycle model which describes a linear projection for the life of a record. From creation to either retention or destruction the role of the record can only exist in one frame of the life-cycle at a time. The records continuum proposed by Australian archivists expands the meaning and use of a record, allowing the record to be both dormant and active at the same time. This pluralisation of properties means a record can exist to support bureaucratic functions and be ‘a memory’ simultaneously. Sue McKemmish argues that there is a perception that records managers are concerned with corporate memory while archivists are concerned with collective memory.[18] McKemmish suggests that the continuum balances these roles.

Mark Greene argued that history is based around reinterpreting the facts of memory, because history, and by extension archives, are inherently untrusting of the merits of memory.[19] The fluidity and continuity of memory does not sit right with archives, who instead demand fixed storage-box models of history.[20] Clearly archives have a relationship with memory but it is troubled and so a particular archival interpretation of memory has developed. This interpretation is much more closely aligned with much of the literature on mnemonic devices – after all, as discussed earlier, it is physically impossible to archive something as abstract as a memory. This paper will now examine archives as mnemonic devices and as repositories of mnemonic devices.

Memory tools and mnemonics vary from society to society. As Laura Miller argues a society that values the art of storytelling may approach the preservation of memories differently to a society that values the written above an oral tradition.[21] The Inca of ancient Peru used knots, each knot holding a specific value, to record their empire, from daily transactions to long-term tributes.[22] This mnemonic was used instead of the Western development of writing. Similarly in the 19th Century the Luba tribe of central Africa created memory boards as mnemonics to Luba history. These boards would be ‘read’ by experts and idiosyncrasies in the patterns, colours, materials and general shape would aid the ‘reader’s’ memory, evoking different interpretations by different ‘readers’ or even by the same expert upon different ‘readings’.[23]

The Incan practice of Quipu was a system for record keeping using cords and knots to record data.

Much of archival and memory literature uses such terms as traces, touchstones, goads, totems, and aides to describe a record’s relation to memory. Wallen describes archives as containing “droplets of time – observations, registrations, notations, pieces of data that can reawaken a memory.”[24] Similarly Miller calls the ’bits and pieces’ found in archives ‘engrams’, as being the stored fragments of an episode.[25] In this mnemonic sense records are not tangible memories but tangible artefacts for reconnecting with memories. Lowenthal argues that records (he uses the example of a photograph) are aids to memory but also a verification tool that our recollections are faithful to the past.[26] Psychologist Ulric Neisser likens the reconstruction of the past to the paleontological reconstruction of dinosaur skeletons – “[o]ut of a few stored bones …we remember a dinosaur.”[27]

Miller uses the example of a legal contract to expand the concept of archival traces as mnemonic devices. Whilst a contract is a legal agreement to ensure compliance between two parties it is also an “antidote to false remembering” as evidence of a transaction. More than this, the contract also recalls the parties’ own episodic memories.[28] In a Proustien sense archival documents are the physical representations of transactions and memories – the ‘madeleine’.

Archives now seek to create these ‘madeleines’ for under-recorded communities or for communities that don’t associate with a written tradition. Community engagement has become a central focus for archival institutions. By creating ‘traces’ in a multitude of media – photographs, sound recordings, moving images, visual art, monuments – archives are allowing communities to control how they wish to transmit their heritage, their memories.[29] Susan Sontag argues that the totemic properties of media, in particular photographs, can be more likely to resonate with individuals than a verbal slogan.[30] The Western focus on writing as the primary means of information and memory transmission is egotistical and lacks diversity in its vision of inclusivity.

Sontag argues that all memory is unique: that, as it dies with each individual, it is unreproducible.[31] Memories are literally a biological phenomenon literally only existing in a living individual. By extension mnemonics require an individual to read or interpret them and it is here that there is a need to separate the roles of individual and collective memory. Miller likens this experience to the fallen tree metaphor – that, like the tree, a records ‘sound’ may only be heard when there is someone there to hear it.[32] From a Western perspective we have disassociated ourselves from our own personal memories, giving control of them to archival and records management institutions for ‘safe-keeping’. Modern individuals have developed a symbiotic relationship with archives – donating their information and memories for safe-keeping and easy retrieval in out of body/off-site storage, and in return they contribute to a collective narrative. Wallen argues that in this sense autobiography is in part constructed out of the archive, that there is a “haunting” suspicion that someone or something knows us better than we know ourselves.[33] Archives allow individuals to connect with elements of their own past that has either been forgotten or was never registered as a memory, in what Olick and Robins call “graveyards of knowledge.”[34]

Biologically speaking memory traces in the hippocampus are thought to critically depend on stress steroid activation in the amygdala.[35] What this means is that the strongest memories that individuals keep tend to be created from emotionally charged situations. These individual memories of significant circumstances reflect well in a collective memory setting but this also means that individuals fail to capture more trivial memories. Archives are capable of capturing the most minute transactions on both an individual and a collective scale, something which human memory struggles to cope with.

To archives an individual memory is essentially irrelevant but it’s role in collective memory and narratives is essential. The fabric of collective memories is woven in the recording of individual memory strands. Sontag expanded on her argument about individual identities by stating that collective memory is not about remembrance but about stipulation – stipulation “that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”[36] Archives build on this by allowing individuals to integrate their various persona pasts into a single common past that all members of a community come to collectively remember.[37] In the 19th Century it became a popular idea that the body could retain traces of the memories of ancestors, that memory and heredity were essentially the same thing.[38] Freud built on this concept through ‘ancestral memories’, his belief that organic memory theories could be psychoanalytically used to understand human culture.[39] Freud believed that the human unconscious was a repository for all past experiences and that it was forgetting, rather than remembering, that took [work] in the form of repression.[40] Darwin argued against this Lamarckian methodology. Stepping away from the biological feasibility of being able to connect with an ancestral memory, archives offer a very similar experience – archival records and documents grant access to an ancestral era that as Freud would argue, society has ‘consciously’ forgotten about.

Collective memory has implications for Terry Cook’s observation of archival paradigm shifts. The current focus on identity and community has led to the use of archives for the construction of broad collective narratives and an over-reliance on ‘history’. Before this paradigm shift ‘the past’ would impact and direct collective memory not evidentially but mythologically. Now society uses collective memory, in the form of ‘history’ to shape the past. This presentist view argues that the past is moulded to suit present interest.[41] The Jungian perspective would argue that, because of this lack of mythology, society now looks to archives to create the necessary archetypes. In this sense memory is no longer a social practise. As Pierre Nora said, “There are lieux de memoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de memoire, real environments of memory.”[42] Society has lost its “memorial consciousness” because individuals have abandoned it.[43] King Thamus’ claim that those who adopt the practice of writing appear to have been accurate. Society adopted writing and as a result created institutions that could control their memories for them. This is what Derrida meant when he described the archive as hypnomnesic.[44]

In Charlie Brooker’s acclaimed TV series Black Mirror the episode entitled ‘Entire History of You’ exemplifies what dystopia might be created if individuals had constant access to their memories – making it impossible to forget, and possible to obsess. The unbearable weight of memory becomes overwhelming for individuals. There is too much injustice in the world, and too much remembering embitters humanity. As Sontag argues, “To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”[45]

In many ways archives have supplanted memory. Archives claim to contain memory, but only the archival definition of memory. Artist Šehovic created an immersive piece to commemorate the Srebrenica massacre. In the aftermath of the event the archival record will show numbers of victims, personal information about them, and data relating to their lives.

‘Cups of Coffee’ by Aida Sehović’s is an installation consisting of coffee cups collected from Bosnian families around the world.

piece was designed to capture what eludes an archive – the lived experience. The project, called ‘Why are you not here?’, focused around the Bosnian tradition of sharing coffee. While archives will hold the data relating the victims’ lives they will never truly be able to capture the act of sharing coffee or, post-Srebrenica, not being able to share that coffee with a lost loved one. The archival record will be devoid of that emotional experience and will instead just capture a series of events and actors.[46] As Martine Hawkes argues, “[h]ow can a life reduced to a short line on a list – only admissible as a short line – be testified or borne witness to in its full weight and meaning?”[47]

It is not only in the area of capturing the un-capturable elements of memory that archives have struggled. As Olick and Robins argue, it is often difficult to reach a mnemonic consensus.[48] If we are to treat archives as the houses of mnemonic touchstones, society’s tangible collective memory, society should be ensuring that it truly is a collective memory. Sontag argues that there is no such thing as collective memory but instead there is ‘collective instruction.’[49] Archival interference extends much further than acquisition policies. Archivists now actively engage with records, leaving layers of procedural traces on them. Archives tend to reflect an elite and anti-populist world view. Firstly this means that the story represented is of national or international activity rather than local or regional experiences;[50] and secondly that various social groups – women, LGBT, ethnic minorities – can be sidelined, intentionally or otherwise, from the archival record. That is not to say that a mythologised collective memory would resolve the problem of elitism of social groups. Archival collections, according to Hillary Jenkinson, should be delivered to the archives whole and the archivist is not to meddle or adulterate the collections – but Jenkinson worked in an era before mass information production. In the 1950s Schellenberg revised Jenkinson’s premise and introduce appraisal in a move to control the sheer quantity of information being handled by archives. Eric Ketelaar invented the term archivalization [sic] meaning “the conscious or unconscious choice (determined by social and cultural factors) to consider something worth archiving.”[51] This element of the appraisal process identified records and memories and prioritised those which are deemed ‘worthy’. As a result of this archives were no longer holding ‘complete’ collections and as a consequence their ability to accurately reflect their societies was undermined.

Furthermore the practises of description and arrangement alter user interpretation of archival records. Archivists layer their own interpretations on a document or a series of documents, guiding a user to a certain conclusion. The archive represents the end of a certain kind of creative innocence, inferring self-consciousness and self-reflexivity onto records.[52] Archival interference has destroyed any notion that archives are capable of entirely recording the past.[53] With this in mind it is deceptive for archives to claim to hold memory, or even a complete set of untouched touchstones for accessing said memory – archivists are not clairvoyants, they cannot predict what records will trigger what memories in the future.[54]

The archival struggle with memory stems in part from the fact that archives simply don’t trust memory. Fixity is fundamental to archival records, cementing information in a stable and unchangeable format for transmission. Luciana Duranti examined the elements that underpin what makes a record factual, arguing that “[a] record is considered reliable when it can be treated as a fact in itself, that is, as the entity of which it is evidence.”[55] In addition to this Duranti proposed another element – authenticity – which requires that the record has not been manipulated or falsified after its creation and is therefore what it (the record) claims to be.[56] Matthew Innes argues that “oral tradition[s] can be very radically reshaped by changes in social, political and cultural contexts, and can fall into oblivion without acts of conscious destruction.”[57] Furthermore authentic records can trigger inauthentic memories. When Bruno Dössekker published his memoirs as a camp survivor of the Holocaust few had reason to doubt his account. Yet during the 1990s it was debunked as having been entirely fabricated. Dössekker had constructed an identity, Binjamin Wilkomirski, by absorbing accounts of camp life, the stories of extreme violence, the testimonies and histories and photographs, and they finally became him.[58] Dössekker’s exposure to Holocaust media had consumed him, having been so deeply affected by the event that he became an inadvertent victim. It is this element of uncertainty about the evidential quality of oral testimony and oral history that sits uncomfortably with archives. To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, records cannot be killed by fire, people die, but records never die, records are weapons[59] – whilst human memory can be eradicated, the physical counterparts to memory will remain. As previously mentioned, there is now a conscious effort to work through this problem and develop archival oral history projects to capture a greater selection of formats for collections. Perhaps archives will overcome this fear of fluidity in records, after all, as Greene puts it – “History is interpretation, and as such it is subject to exactly those same societal biasses that are supposedly the weakness of “memory”.”[60]

Whether archives have undermined memory is very much a Platonian vs. Aristotilian debate. King Thamus argued that society would become forgetful as a consequence of the invention of writing, an idea that Nora believes has become reality in the modern world. Conversely Aristotle believed that individuals, born like blank slates, would amass memories and be bettered for this amassing. Should, or even could, a society capable of creating such large amounts of ‘memory’ entrust its preservation to human minds? Conversely, should this responsibility be given to archives? Derrida vehemently sides with King Thamus, arguing that archives “incite forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mnēmē or anamnēsis” and that the rigid formula of the archive eradicates what cannot be archived.[61] Conversely Sontag argues that too much value has been assigned to memory but not enough to thinking.[62] Perhaps the act of writing and recording has freed the human mind from its bonds of memory to fulfil a greater potential of ‘knowledge’.

There is an elitist element of archival thought which values the tangible over the intangible and so, fundamentally, archives have undermined memory –  intangible memory created by a human no longer has the value that it once had. Society should question the archival monopoly on memory and ask why a document of an event is apparently more representative than a human that actually experienced it? But society does not consciously remember and as a consequence society is subconsciously forgetting much of its cultural and collective memory. Archives have depersonalised memory and made it own-able, the classic oral traditions eroded by modernity.

Archives have however created and preserved tangible mnemonic devices in order to help recall the intangible memories of the past. Like Cicero’s ‘treasure-house of all things’ and St. Augustine’s ‘inner chamber, vast and unbounded’, archives have become society’s memory repositories,[63] not society’s memory. Miller argues that archives and archivists risk professional marginalisation if they continue to use the outdated metaphors of ‘archives as memory’ instead of archives as mnemonics.[64] Derrida described the conflict between writing and speech as a ‘pharmakon’[65] – that which whilst healing, also poisons. Archives have undermined the human ability to ‘remember’, but at the same time have found a way to reconnect society to their forgotten memories. The archival relationship with memory needs to be symbiotic – obliged to collect humanity’s memories in whatever format they may be and, in return, society can outsource their memory functions. Archives house society’s mnemonics so that society can not necessarily remember but recollect.

Ginny Dawe-Woodings, BA

1. Plato, Phaedrus, (Edited by Harvey Yunis, 2011)
2. Terry Cook, ‘Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2013), Vol. 13, p. 101
3. Steven Roger Fischer, History of Writing, (2001), p. 11
4. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 106
5. Terry Cook, ‘Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2013), Vol. 13, p. 96
6. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 111
7. Anthea Josias, ‘Toward an understanding of archives as a feature of collective memory’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2011), Vol. 11, p. 109
8. Terry Cook, ‘Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2013), Vol. 13, p. 104
9. Ibid, p. 102-103
10. Jeffrey K. Olick, Joyce Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practises’ in Annual Review of Sociology, (Annual Reviews, 1998), Vol. 24, p. 122
11. Steven Rose, The Making of Memory, (Anchor Books, 1992), p. 60
12. Jeffrey Wallen, ‘Narrative tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness’ in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, (2009), Vol. 7, No. 2, p. 269
13. Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects, (2012), Chapter 13
14. Rachel Hardiman, ‘En mal d’archive: Postmodernist Theory and Recordkeeping’ in Journal of the Society of Archivists, (2009), Vol. 30, No. 1, p. 32
15. Society of American Archivists, Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology – ‘Total Archives’, (http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/t/total-archives, accessed 29th March 2015)
16. Jeffrey Wallen, ‘Narrative tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness’ in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, (2009), Vol. 7, No. 2, p. 261
17. Terry Cook, Joan M. Schwartz, ‘Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance’ in Archival Science, (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Vol. 2, p. 179
18. Sue McKemmish, “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: A Continuum of Responsibility” in Proceedings of the Records Management Association of Australia 14th National Convention, RMAA, Perth, Australia, (1997) referenced in Brien Brothman, ‘The Past that Archives Keep: Memory, History, and the Preservation of Archival Records’ in Archivaria, (2001), Vol. 51, p. 56
19. Mark A. Greene, ‘The Messy Business of Remembering: History, Memory, and Archives’ in Archival Issues, (2003-2004), Vol. 28, No. 2, p. 97
20. Anthea Josias, ‘Toward an understanding of archives as a feature of collective memory’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2011), Vol. 11, p. 100
21. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 121
22. Steven Roger Fischer, History of Writing, (2001), p. 14
23. Ibid, p. 22
24. Jeffrey Wallen, ‘Narrative tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness’ in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, (2009), Vol. 7, No. 2, p. 261
25. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 111
26. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, (1985), p. 257
27. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 111
28. Ibid, p. 115-116
29. Anthea Josias, ‘Toward an understanding of archives as a feature of collective memory’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2011), Vol. 11, p. 97-98
30. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (Penguin Group, 2003), p. 76
31. Ibid, p. 76-77
32. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 116 Jeffrey Wallen, ‘Narrative tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness’ in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, (2009), Vol. 7, No. 2, p. 269-270
33. Jeffrey K. Olick, Joyce Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practises’ in Annual Review of Sociology, (Annual Reviews, 1998), Vol. 24, p. 111
34. Adam K. Anderson, Yuki Yamaguchi, Wojtek Grabski, Dominika Lacka, ‘Emotional memories are not all created equal: Evidence for selective memory enhancement’ in Learning & Memory, (2006), Vol. 13, p. 715
35. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (Penguin Group, 2003), p. 76-77
36. Anthea Josias, ‘Toward an understanding of archives as a feature of collective memory’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2011), Vol. 11, p. 99
37. Daniel Punday, ‘Foucault’s Body Tropes’ in New Literary History, (2000), Vol. 31, No. 3, p. 518-519
38. Ibid, p. 519
39. Jeffrey K. Olick, Joyce Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practises’ in Annual Review of Sociology, (Annual Reviews, 1998), Vol. 24, p. 109
40. Anthea Josias, ‘Toward an understanding of archives as a feature of collective memory’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2011), Vol. 11, p. 96
41. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’ in Representations, (University of California Press, 1989), Vol. 26, p. 7
42. Ibid, p. 12
43. Jaques Derrida, Archive Fever, (The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 11
44. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (Penguin Group, 2003), p. 103
45. Martine Hawkes, ‘Containing testimony: archiving loss after genocide’ in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, (Routledge, 2012), Vol. 26, No. 6, p. 937
46. Ibid, p. 939
47. Jeffrey K. Olick, Joyce Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practises’ in Annual Review of Sociology, (Annual Reviews, 1998), Vol. 24, p. 127
48. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (Penguin Group, 2003), p. 76
49. Terry Cook, ‘Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting paradigms’ in Archival Science, (2013), Vol. 13, p. 106
50. Eric Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives’ in Archival Science, (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), Vol. 1, p. 132-133
51. Stuart Hall, ‘Constituting an archive’ in Third Text, (2001), Vol. 15, No. 54, p. 89
52. Terry Eastwood, ‘What is Archival Theory and Why is it Important?’ in Archivaria, (1994), Vol. 37, p. 130
53. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 122-123
54. Luciana Duranti, ‘Reliability and Authenticity: The Concepts and Their Implications’ in Archivaria (1995), Vol. 39, p. 6
55. Ibid, p. 7-8
56. Matthew Innes, ‘Memory, Orality and Literacy in Early Medieval Society’ in Past & Present, (1998), Vol. 158, p. 34
57. Amy Hungerford, “Memorizing Memory’ in The Yale Journal of Criticism, (The John Hopkins University Press, 2001), Vol. 14, No. 1, p. 88
58. ‘Books are weapons in the war of ideas’, Library of Congress Prints and photographs Division, Washington D.C., Reproduction number: LC-USZC4-4267
59. Mark A. Greene, ‘The Messy Business of Remembering: History, Memory, and Archives’ in Archival Issues, (2003-2004), Vol. 28, No. 2, p. 97
60. Jaques Derrida, Archive Fever, (The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 11
61. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (Penguin Group, 2003), p. 103
62. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 107
63. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 108-109
64. Jaques Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy in Dissemination, (1981)