In which I try not to fluster archivists

I know, I know, these posts are like London busses. But I had a (mis)adventurous day in Wiesbaden on Monday that just demands to be chronicled. The Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, despite its sonorous name and importance, is tucked up behind a middle school and an Asian grocery west of the central train station, the direction none of the tourists go. The first time I visited its premises, I stopped numerous people for directions, all of whom were a bit confused by the question. The journey was easier on the second time, though; I admired the 19th-century villas I passed, and even knew which side streets to take to avoid pedaling up steep hills. I gave my name at the reception, fed a carefully kept 1 euro piece into one of the lockers in the subterranean space where the coffee automat lives, and headed to the reading room. It was once there that the comical adventures started.

New archives, new cities: Würzburg

I spent the last two days in Würzburg! Two sunny days in this north Bavarian city made a refreshing change to my routine. Most of these sunny days were spent in the archives, of course, which I'd been needing to check out. The Würzburg branch of the Bavarian State Archives lives in several of the 320 rooms of the Baroque residence built by the prince-archbishop from 1720 onwards. (Video of this extraordinary place here; photos are not allowed inside.) Now, be not deceived: the archives are in a rear courtyard in a side wing; the barred windows suggest that the rooms were previously service rooms. But the space is nevertheless impressively spacious, and on Friday morning, I got the reading room to myself, with early morning light streaming through the windows, and the enormous palace gardens waking up on the other side.

Dealing with the head archivist was a bit of an adventure, not only because of his Bavarian accent. I was obliquely critiqued for not showing up on the first day I'd planned to show up; I explained that this was due to my misunderstanding the fact that my "May I view the following manuscripts?"e-mail had received a reply reading "Please send us your postal address so that we can send you information." Apparently this is merely a legal formality, and I was expected. I apologized humbly and repeatedly, and was initiated into Würzburg's organizational system for its Mainz holdings. Not everything was digitalized, I was told; that takes time. It turned out that this meant searching through a variety of typewritten Findbücher (incomplete, the head archivist told me; but everything takes time…) and an impressively large collection of handwritten slips dating to the 1930s, when the charters from Mainz had last been catalogued. Fortunately, the medieval scribes of the codices belonging to the "books from Mainz with various contents" collection had made tables of contents. Is there a patron saint of such scribes? A day devoted to praying fervently for their souls? I think there should be.

Another nice surprise was running into acquaintances. As I was getting a mid-afternoon apple from my locker, a voice behind me said: "So, Mainz is not enough for you?" and I turned to find none other than the amiable Herr Professor who wrestles with 18th-century officialdom and its handwriting. We chatted over our apples before returning to our respective tasks. On the second day (when the Herr Professor had returned to Mainz) the vaguely-familiar man at the desk behind me said "We know each other from Mainz, don't we?" and I placed him as the musicologist responsible for the recent transcription of a Don Giovanni adaptation written for one of Mainz's archbishops shortly after the opera's premiere. These are small encounters… but I mention them because I've missed this sort of companionable chat, the sense of having a routine where one is likely to encounter those with similar interests. In New York, of course, the place where I have such encounters is the opera… but archives are nice places to have them too. Without further rambling, though: photos! Würzburg's archive closes at noon on Friday, so I spent several hours of a pleasantly sunny afternoon exploring the Residence gardens and the city before catching a train back to Mainz.

Helau! Carneval in Mainz

Meenzer Fassenacht, as it's known in the local dialect, is a really big deal around here. It was 3 weeks ago that Steffi, a fellow alto, asked if I was "inzwischen Fassenachterin geworden." From the beginning of February onwards, members of the Carnevalsvereine were active in the streets, with brass ensembles (natürlich) and "Zugplakettcher," little tokens sold to finance the annual parade. Endlich war es dann soweit… for the week leading up to Ash Wednesday, madness was loose in the city; at all times of day, men, women, and children could be seen in costume; bunting and colored paper and silly hats were everywhere. On Monday and Tuesday, the archives and city library were entirely closed! And because I could only answer "So, are you planning to see the parade?" with a stammered "Um… maybe… I probably should…" my choir director took pity on me and practically ordered me to join his parade-going posse. So, gathering my courage in both hands, I headed out (after finishing a conference paper draft in the early morning hours.) I reminded myself that my devoting an entire day to dressing up, admiring a parade, and subsisting largely on punch and popcorn is a textbook example of carnivalesque inversion. Photographic evidence below:

High points

I spent this past Friday and Saturday at an academic workgroup meeting: a slightly less formal version of a conference, plus an organizational meeting. And although I find writing grant applications where I create an autobiographical narrative artificially culminating in a particular academic experience rather irritating, I have to say that a weekend of discussing medieval religious women in a castle more or less fulfills the wildest dreams of my 17-year-old self about Being A Medievalist. (Parenthetical realization: I appear to have spent almost a decade of my life so far training to Be A Medievalist. I might feel mildly panicky about this, if I weren't still on a high from spending a weekend discussing medieval religious women. In a castle.)

Looking back from above the village

Further (mis)adventures in the archives

I conceived the ambitious plan of finishing out this week (before spending the weekend at an academic workshop about religious women; yay!) by visiting the archives of Aschaffenburg, and seeing if their legal and medical texts from the region had any helpful marginalia or, at the very least, enough indications of provenance to allow me to cite them. I was led by a published catalog of manuscripts, but encountered confusion when I reached the internet site which lumped the Stifts- and Stadtbibliotheken together, and where the only e-mail address I could find was for the Stadtsarchiv. Still, I e-mailed them the evening before my visit. This wasn't listed as mandatory on the site, so I thought of it as a courteous, as well as a convenient gesture (and this approach had worked for me in Speyer and elsewhere.) Here, my optimism proved to be unfounded. After stopping by the Stadtbibliothek and finding it was not what I wanted, I followed the directions of the helpful young woman there to the Stadtsarchiv, which was located in a 16th-century episcopal residence:

Research montage? updates from the archives

Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt 

The new archive director of Darmstadt is a mysterious man; he is unseen, but the effects of his presence are felt. "He is of a more restrictive nature," said one of the other archivists, explaining why I could not look at original charters anymore (unless specially requested for the sake of seals or legibility) but should instead use the available microfiches. Now, I of course feel very strongly about the desirability of preserving medieval charters. In the interests of this high purpose, I forego the pleasure of (delicately and with scrupulously clean hands and always on a padded support covered in linen) handling them myself… not entirely without repining. On the bright side, this does put the microfiche section of How To Use A Library lessons I had in middle school to good use. My "home base" of Mainz's municipal archive has also putting me at the microfilm reader (in the tiny room also containing the printer and the coffee machine) to look at charters. I have successfully begged for exceptions to the rule there, though. Perhaps a memo went out telling German archivists that more strictness should be their new year's resolution. I still find widely varying policies. Some archives (Darmstadt, Würzburg) only bring out documents twice a day; others will get materials for you whenever you need them. In Mainz, it's been policy for years not to allow photographs; elsewhere, archivists have taken initiative in offering that I can photograph things! [Side note: if I take photos on my phone, I can turn said photos into a PDF and then export the PDF into the software program that I use to take notes on my computer. Who needs flying cars?]

This past week contained a journey to a new archive, this time in Worms. Worms' claims to fame, historically speaking, are its prominence in the Nibelungenlied, and the fact that Martin Luther made himself a public and obstinate heretic there in 1521 ("Hier stehe ich…") On Wednesday, my day was mostly spent looking at the account books of the city's leper hospital, but there was a two-hour lunch break in which I had nothing to do but eat a sandwich. I spent the rest of it biking around to look at churches. So, without further ado, Worms:

Nun ist die Welt so trübe...

I had a grand plan for this Saturday afternoon: to descend on the costume sale of Wiesbaden's opera house and carry off a costume (if affordable) that would enable me to spend the Carneval season as Cherubino or one of his cousins of the operatic repertoire. This should have been a straightforward proceeding. There is no bus that goes directly into central Wiesbaden from the large bus stop nearest to Mainz's archives, but I was undeterred; I decided to take a bus part of the way into the city outskirts, and simply follow the train tracks into the center from there. (I decided that waiting 20 whole minutes for a train would be silly. Ha.) Following the train tracks turned out to be easier said than done, and I set a personal record for getting lost, making three different complete loops. I did ask directions twice… and ended up cycling in circles both times. Almost three hours later, I arrived at my destination just as the costume sale was ending, and cycled back to Wiesbaden's central train station. Now, if I had only memorized Schubert's Winterreise, I could have sung it through on my way in belated observance of his birthday. As I hadn't, I just sang fragments of it as seemed apt, addressing several crows as "Wunderliches Tier!" etc. The following photos are otherwise all I have to show for my journey.