How do we read against the archive when our primary remaining sources are unreliable or missing entirely?
About three weeks ago, I found myself with two incredible colleagues presenting on memory projects at the German Chancellor Fellow halftime conference. We were asked to provide brief updates on our work, so the three of us took a collective approach and pulled lessons from each of our projects: Alex talked about monuments and the ways that we publicly present memory, Nick discussed case studies of removal of Confederate statues in the U.S., and I posed questions about reading against the archive.
Reading against the archive is a historical research strategy that involves looking for the silences and the gaps. Scholar Rodney G.S. Carter argues that these silences can stem from intentional erasure, lack of authority (such as a given source not being recognized as credible or important enough to be included in an archive), or formats unfamiliar to the dominant group in a society (such as oral historical traditions in a society where written data is prioritized); archivists must thus understand the highly political nature of their work, as they construct a history from the texts and objects included in their collections. As historians or historical researchers, we need to read for the power dynamics and the gaps in these archives, understanding whose stories are missing and why –– in other words, we can’t take these archives as complete, unbiased truths.
As a prime example, many of the state records we have on the homosexual movements of the 1970s in East Germany come from Stasi surveillance; beginning in the 1960s, Stasi believed that homosexual men were likely to be recruited as spies for the West because they thought the men were more prone to “conspiratorial behaviour” than their heterosexual counterparts, according to States of Liberation.
As a result, the Stasi often hired homosexual men to spy on their own social and political groups, creating a complicated network of Stasi informants and homosexual groups. The relationship between these groups and the state was complicated, and as homosexual groups interacted with the state, like attempting multiple times to achieve official state recognition, that relationship was tainted by Stasi expectations and records. Yet as Samuel Clowes Huneke argues in States of Liberation, Stasi records are notoriously unreliable, as they often contained “numerous exaggerations and falsehoods” –– so how do we read against the archive here?
For one, it is helpful to collect multiple points of view, especially when subjects from different angles of a story are still around and able to share their side. It can also be helpful to look at different types of sources, like the way that Annette Timm traced connections between German physician and sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and American sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey through endocrinologist Dr. Harry Benjamin using letters, scientific notes, and other correspondence in Others of my Kind (a journey that also showed that trans people themselves had a larger influence on Dr. Kinsey than previously thought!).
Historian Ralf Dose, who wrote a comprehensive book on Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and his work, faced a different struggle when compiling records for the Magnus Hirschfeld Society here in Berlin, which he co-founded. Dr. Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science (and most of his physical work, including patient records) was burned by Nazi-adjacent groups in 1933, and only a fraction of Hirschfeld’s library and work survived: some pieces remained with Hirschfeld where he was in France, on a speaking tour, with two lovers, later ending up in Canada before Dose picked them up; some were reportedly shipped and secured by Hirschfeld before the burning but have never been found; others were rumored to have been smuggled out but have remained hidden nearly a century later.
Dose has spent decades compiling an archive alongside other dedicated historians at the Magnus Hirschfeld Society, but he’s still missing many important pieces of information, like patient files. The challenge of reconstructing the archive seems to have allowed for a more expansive understanding of the period, though. As the team has discovered new information, including interviews with Hirschfeld’s relatives and a former janitor at the institute and visits to ethnographic collections for possible artifacts, according to a National Geographic article on the subject, it has also discovered that the truth of Dr. Hirschfeld’s work expands far beyond its initial expectations.
Much of this work reminds me of my journalism training at Ohio University: gather information from all points of view (but don’t necessarily give them all equal weight), read against a given source’s answers for what might be missing and find a source to supplement it, and always try to speak to human sources as well as traditional archives. I would love to hear other strategies for filling in gaps and silences (when the subject wants to be included in an archive) –– feel free to share in the comments. Challenge your existing knowledge, and never take a source at its face value for the whole, objective truth.
Further Reading:
The great hunt for the world’s first LGBTQ archive
Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence
Samuel Clowes Huneke’s States of Liberation
Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories
Originally published on Cumulative Realities on May 19, 2023.
Abby Jeffers 