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I’m think of archives, photographs, and alterity in the reading of the ordinary. Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives deploys the chance encounter and temporal to place archives in conversation with one another. In these telepathic archives, the image serves as a sort of communicative interlocutor who instructs the reader on what to make of it. Howe locates a "visionary spirit, a deposit from a future yet to come," in the domain of research libraries and special collections. This "mystic documentary telepathy" arrives suddenly, pressing "things-in-themselves" against "things-as-they-were-for-us."

Here, the poet centers the "insignificant" material details: "quotations, thought-fragments, rhymes, syllables, anagrams, graphemes, endangered phonemes, in soils and cross-out." Howe rewrote William Carlos Williams' Paterson — an archival study of the scholar's relationship to the text.

This playful engagement of archives lends itself to poesis. But archives are more complicated where I come from. . . archives are expected to provide a sort of justice. I should begin with a word, lustration, that hangs over European history as well as art. The etymology draws on the ancient Latin word, lustratio, meaning “purification by sacrifice”:

“Purification by sacrifice” is an action undertaken to restore lost purity, and that is certainly the way many politicians have attempted to efface the past crimes of governments: name the dirty ones and ask them to stand as scapegoats for the things ordinary citizens did at a time when their governments funded and sustained genocide, war crimes, and pageants perfumed by patriotism.

Baptism, itself, is a form of lustrating ritual. For context, however, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia’s entry on the lustrations of the 1990’s in Central and Eastern Europe:

Lustration in Central and Eastern Europe is the official public procedure of scrutinizing a public official or a candidate for public office in terms of their history as a witting confidential collaborator (informant) of relevant former communist secret police, an activity widely condemned by the public opinion of those states as morally corrupt due to its essential role in suppressing political opposition and enabling persecution of dissidents. Surfacing of evidence for such a past activity typically inflicts severe reputation damage to the person concerned. It should not be confused with decommunization which is the process of barring former communist regular officials from public offices as well as eliminating communist symbols.

The principle of non-retroactivity means that a past role of a confidential collaborator (informant) is alone as such inadmissible from the beginning for criminal prosecution or conviction, thus, lustration allows at least to bring such past collaborators to moral responsibility by making the public opinion aware of the established outcomes through their free dissemination. Another motivation was the fear that undisclosed past confidential collaboration could be used to blackmail public officials by foreign intelligence services of other former Warsaw Pact allies, in particular Russia.

Depending on jurisdiction, either every positive result or only the one obtained regarding a person who falsely declared otherwise, may trigger consequences varying greatly among jurisdictions, ranging from mere infamy to purging the person from office and a 10-year exclusion from holding public offices. Various forms of lustration were employed in post-communist Europe.

In the curation of historical memory, the interest of the nation-state and empire often diverges from that of the scholar. Public memory, after genocide and war, demands recollection, or re-collecting.

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Horst Richter was a school teacher, a father, a community member known for his staunch, traditional valorization of family life. He was also a member of the Nazi Socialist Party, a war veteran, an owner of faded Nazi uniforms. 

When the postwar lustration of German Nazis began, Horst lost his teaching license. His son, Gerhard Richter, spent his childhood in the Third Reich. Many years later, Gerhard vaguely recalled the attractions of militarism as a young member of the Hitler Youth. Childhood marks its weather on the basis of sunniness, and how close the next son is to the rays of the father. 

Gerhard Richter's photographs lustrate themselves by over-exposing the image. I am staring at a photograph of his aunt, Marianne, who was committed to an asylum for schizophrenia at the age of 18.  By the war's end, 3,272 patients of the state mental institution had been murdered as part of the Nazi program to exterminate the mentally ill or socially unstable. Aunt Marianne was among them.

Richter implies that his uncle worked at the hospital where Aunt Marianne was interned. 

Werner Heyde was one of the psychiatrists who organized Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program. When the war ended, Heyde was imprisoned along with other Nazi officials. In 1947, Heyde escaped. Hidden behind the alias Fritz Sawade, Heyde practiced sports medicine and psychiatry in the town of Flensburg. He shopped at the grocery store. He served as an expert witness in local court cases. For 13 years, Mr. Sawade lived as an ordinary, upper-middle-class German until a falling-out with a friend led to his identity being betrayed. 

On November 12, 1959, Werner Heyde turned himself in to police in Frankfurt, ending 13 years as a fugitive. The picture below was taken at his arrest.

In 1964, a few days before he was put on trial for his war crimes, Heyde knotted a noose and ended his own life.

Gerhard Richter painted "Herr Heyde" in 1965 based on Heyde's arrest photo. It is no longer on display anywhere. The painted caption reads: "Werner Heyde in November 1959, turning himself in to the authorities." Richter described this painting as an effort to evoke the paranoia of realizing that one’s neighbors served as functionaries in the state apparatus of genocide. 

In 2002, Richter still claimed that there was no conscious link between his aunt's deaths and the juxtaposition of these early family portraits. Childhood is when the family portrait is strange but not yet evil: it hasn’t been developed in a darkroom yet.

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There is a poem by Phillis Wheatley that speaks to recollection here, in the US: it is a brilliant poem and I find myself leaning along its edges and rhyme schemes, noting how formal rules often served as tests for demonstrating poetic competence. In 1761, a slave ship brought the poet from West Africa to Boston, where she was purchased by a rich tailor and his wife. Six years later, Wheatley’s first poem was published in Newport, Rhode Island’s local newspaper.

In 1773, Wheatley published her only collection of books, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, with a press in London. It was the first published book by what historians called “African-Americans,” at a time, of course, when that moniker referred to Black persons enslaved by white men. Wheatley, herself, was still enslaved when this groundbreaking book was published. She was officially ‘freed’ in 1778 and she went on to marry another freedman, John Peters. But Peters abandoned her and their children in Boston. This city, Boston, is where Phillis lived in poverty, losing two children and nursing a mortally ill child when she died and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Here is one of the thirty-six poems published in Phillis Wheatley’s book:

After purchasing his slave, John Wheatley ‘gave her’ an American name. He re-baptized her. He purified her of all connections to what she calls her “Pagan land” in first line of “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” The relationship between colonialism and Messianism continues to haunt US policy. Whenever an ethnic group or nationality is described as ancestrally related to Cain, I cringe with disgust. There is nothing harmless or innocent in colonialism’s sick and vicious gods.