Missing Paul Robeson in East Berlin the Spirituals and the Empty Archive

MISSING PAUL ROBESON IN EAST BERLIN THE SPIRITUALS AND THE EMPTY ARCHIVE Todd Carmody You may well ask why Paul Robeson means so much to our people. Why do we have a Paul Robeson committee or a Paul Robeson Archive? Why do our school children learn about him and why is he an inspiration to us on our road to communism? I am not sure that I have the whole answer to these questions. But surely one reason is what we learned from the terrible experiences under fascism. —Frank Loeser, President of East Germany’s Paul Robeson Committee, Ansprache zur Veranstaltung “What Is America To Me,” August 2, 1973, 19:30, Kosmos Theater In 1965 East Berlin’s Academy of the Arts established the Paul Robeson Archive, honoring a prominent African American singer and activist who visited the German Democratic Republic on but three occasions. Robeson traveled to the GDR twice for state ceremonies in 1960 and again for medical convalescence a few years later. Each of these trips was brief, and during his Wnal stay Robeson saw no visitors and made no public appearances. East Berlin may thus seem an un- likely site for the Robeson Archive; Robeson’s ties to the socialist Ger- man state were not especially strong and never as well established as his links to Britain or the Soviet Union, or even to other Soviet satellite states. But surprising though its location may be, the collection amassed by the East German Academy of the Arts is extensive. Among the academy’s holdings are a handful of private letters and candid photo- graphs, audio outtakes and reading notes—ephemeral traces of an everyday life shaded from the glare of international celebrity. Personal artifacts like these, comparatively rare in the Robeson collection, lend the past a comforting sense of familiarity. They encourage us to imagine the archive qua cultural institution as a space in which distant histo- ries are rendered immediate and where we might, taking the singular object in hand, better grasp the lived experiences of those who have Cultural Critique 88—Fall 2014—Copyright 2014 Regents of the University of Minnesota This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:32:31 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 2 TODD CARMODY come before us. The romance of the archive is this promise of proxim- ity. As Carolyn Steedman writes, “You think, in the delirium: it was their dust that I breathed in” (19). Most of the academy’s holdings, however, offer no such intimacy. The archive in Berlin might best be described, in fact, as a transatlantic paper trail. More bibliography than reliquary, it contains thousands of photocopied newspaper articles, scholarly essays, and popular books. These documents are generally about rather than by Robeson, and most duplicate materials readily accessible elsewhere. While a few of Robeson’s personal papers and belongings made their way to East Ber- lin, most of the materials were obtained by diligent archivists and administrators tasked with tracking down anything and everything written about Robeson.1 Founded not by bequest but by request, the Robeson Archive is thus awash in photocopies and offprints, desk copies and microWlms. The sheer volume of secondary materials gives pause. Why would the cultural arm of the East German government go to such lengths to commemorate an American dissident who was often invited but rarely visited? What purpose could an archive of photocopies serve? Internal memos suggest that preservation and pedagogy were guiding concerns from the start. Claiming in the mid-1950s that “reac- tionary imperialist forces” were endangering Robeson’s legacy, for example, the board charged with “Founding a Committee to Create a Paul Robeson Archive” declared the urgency of “collecting and evalu- ating the entire documentary record of his achievement” before it was too late (Konzeption).2 As Victor Grossman, director of the archive from 1965 to 1968, would later recount: “The Robesons had been targeted by cold war hatred and racism in the United States, and this archive was meant as a rejoinder” (2003, 176). Initial proposals also called for materials in the archive to be made widely available. Citizens of East Berlin and the environs could visit the collections in person; school Weld trips were an especially high priority. Genossen in other parts of the country were to be reached with traveling exhibitions and museum loans. In each of these instantiations, the archive would seek to “objec- tively document” the career of an important socialist Mitstreiter whose example was to be “made useful for future generations” (Konzeption). Such tendentious claims to objectivity, of course, are emblematic of the disciplinary function of the archival project tout court. Whether This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:32:31 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MISSING PAUL ROBESON IN EAST BERLIN 3 understood as actual physical spaces or more Wguratively as knowl- edge formations and epistemological regimes, as Ann Stoler notes, archives are always “monuments to particular conWgurations of power” (96). They index not the fullness of history but the narrow prin- ciples of selection by which ideology is naturalized. A clear exercise in socialist pedagogy, the Robeson Archive brings this critical touchstone into sharp relief. But insofar as it is Wlled with photocopies and secondary materials, the Robeson collection also points up another touchstone in recent work on the politics of the archive—the centrality of absence. Once freighted with the romance of recovery, for many scholars the archive has of late become synonymous with emptiness, with the silences and gaps we encounter when setting out to retrieve the stories and experiences obscured by ofWcial history. As Anjali Aron- dekar suggests, to enter the archive is to be left alone with power; it is to search in vain for the “impossible object” that might exceed the archive’s totalizing grasp. Stephen Best likewise argues that the archival turn in anthropology and literary studies has failed to deliver on the utopian promises of history from below. All too often, Best con- tends, the work of recovery amounts to little more than the “pursuit of degraded fragments” (159). Once feverishly embraced, the archival imperative may thus have brought us to a methodological impasse. No matter how self-reXexive our analyses, and no matter how consci- entiously we foreground the limits of recovery, the archive can often seem but “a repository of absence” (155). The mode of absence one encounters in the Robeson Archive is naturally different from the emptiness that for Arondekar character- izes the colonial archive. Different still are the gaps and elisions that for Saidiya Hartman leave slavery’s only extant archive “an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines of a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history” (2). Nor does Fou- cault’s gloss on the “infamous” lives effaced from the annals of the past ring exactly true for the celebrated life and career so diligently archived in East Berlin. But despite the clear distinctions to be made between an archive that instrumentalizes celebrity and archives that render invisible those who “played no appreciable role in events or among important people,” Robeson is also absent from his own archive (Foucault, 162). Lost amid the crush of documentary and agitprop prose, Robeson’s story is legible only as a Bildungsroman of socialist This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:32:31 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 4 TODD CARMODY awakening; his celebrated baritone echoes rather monotonously as the voice of ideological clarity, even or especially in the archive’s care- fully annotated musical division. Emptied of their slavery meanings by ideologically doctrinaire explanatory notes and prefatory materials, the African American spirituals with which Robeson made his name and through which he later deWned his anticolonial politics likewise ring hollow. Despite the breadth of its holdings, in other words, the Robeson collection exempliWes the empty archive of recent critical dis- course, a paradox redoubled by the very kinds of documents amassed in East Berlin—box after box of secondary materials, photocopies, and reprints that cannot help but call absent originals to mind. And yet these same documents also suggest that we rethink our approach to the absence at the center of the archive as such. In the Robeson Archive, absence does more than point up the constitutive limits of the archival project. Absence is here neither a byproduct of power alone nor merely further evidence that reading against the archival grain has run its methodological course. Rather, the Robeson Archive actually cultivates absence as part of its political mandate, balancing “objective” documentation with a pedagogy of desire. East German citizens were taught about Robeson’s career; but they also learned to “miss” Robeson. The absent original in the archive of photocopies, we might say, was the performer himself. As the collection’s holdings bear witness, Robeson cut a decidedly melancholic Wgure throughout East German public culture. From typescripts of invitations that Robeson received but politely declined, to the wistful liner notes that accompa- nied Eterna reissues of his LPs and pensive newspaper accounts of his travels elsewhere, the archive is Wlled with materials that betray a cer- tain longing for Robeson to visit the GDR. The structure of the archive mirrors this affective relation, diligently amassing and Wling away secondary materials that serve as a placeholder for the ever-absent star. All archives are, of course, in some sense placeholders, collating the textual residue of lives and events that can never be fully recreated or reinhabited.

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