[Life and work in east Berlin]

It was nice to have some time to settle into life in Berlin before starting our internships, but I’m happy to report that so far I am loving my job! The archival team at Ernst Busch Universität (“Hochschule für Schauspielkunst”, a university for theatre arts) has been incredibly welcoming; they’re excited to teach me the ins and outs of their profession, and I’m excited to see what new ideas and experience I can bring to the position. Although our first week was only three full work days, due to Ascension Day (a national holiday), they’ve introduced me to many different aspects of archiving already, from cataloguing to conservation techniques, and I look forward to the rest of my internship with them. 

Before getting into what I’ve been doing specifically for my job, I wanted to talk a bit about what it’s been like to work and explore the part of Berlin formerly belonging to East Germany. The institution I work at is named after Ernst Busch, a prominent East German singer and actor, and the school itself achieved university status during the era of the GDR. As an art university located in former East Berlin, where freedom of expression was severely limited by the government, its history is complicated and often quite sad. In the past few days, my supervisor Johanna has given me a tour of the campus and the current exhibition being run by the archival team, which focuses on their collection of art from the GDR. It’s been eye-opening for me, both as someone who is not overly familiar with East German history, and as someone who is interested in hidden or forgotten narratives. For every painting she showed me, she would talk about the paintings that weren’t there, ones that we had in archival records but had since been lost or destroyed. Their absence told a story as much as the paintings on the wall. One portrait we saw, called Ernst Busch III, was hung in the main foyer of the school; however, the exhibition pointed out that Ernst Busch II, the original, was gone. When it was created, it was declared “degenerate” for not complying with the acceptable art style of socialist realism and subsequently bought by the government in order to be destroyed. Years later, the artist gathered some of his thumbnail sketches from his sitting session with the actor, and attempted to remake the painting from memory. We are lucky to have any recreation at all, because the rest of the missing paintings were not as fortunate. 

The rest of Johanna’s guided tour through the building and exhibit was just as somber, as we considered the people who were threatened because they had the nerve to create for the sake of creation, even knowing their self-expression was condemned by the authorities which governed their lives. Working with the school’s archival materials after that was a privilege, especially knowing that the archival team was only established in 2022, and before then the entire archive, which stretches back to 1905, was left in the basement to rot. Johanna and my coworkers are dedicated to saving the history that we still have access to before its too late. 

How exactly we do that gets into more of the precise type of work I’ll be doing while I am here. In this first week, Monday and Tuesday were extremely busy, since we had to prepare the 1905-1930 collection for the Digitalisierung (Digitization) Team, which was coming to pick everything up on Wednesday. This consisted primarily of photographs and records, and one notable item known as “The Gold Book”. This was what acted as a kind of yearbook for the graduates of Ernst Busch back when it was known as the Max Reinhardt theatre school, with each student signing their name with a quote and the date they graduated. I was instructed to decipher each name, which was a fun challenge due to the variability of handwriting in late 19th to early 20th century cursive German, then catalogue them in an excel sheet and cross reference with both archival records and the internet. Time management here was tricky, since we were in a rush to get as many names down as we could before sending the book off to be converted to digital form, so that we’ll still be able to research each person in the next few weeks. It was tempting to just go non-stop, but taking breaks and allocating time more specifically, rather than working on everything at once, is beneficial for productivity. Some of my team members smoke, so whenever they took a smoke break, I would take a walk around the campus. This helped me to familiarize myself with my surroundings as well as reset my brain after hours of the same difficult, if rewarding, work. With this process, we were able to get more than 200 names, and finish cataloguing up to 1926, which is more than enough to last until the book is returned.