Workshop "EHRI and Microarchives in Austria"

The full-day workshop “EHRI and Microarchives in Austria” took place at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies on 4 March 2024. The Institute presented EHRI’s plans to improve support for microarchives and invited Austrian microarchive owners and experts to discuss the opportunities and challenges of collaboration.

In the keynote speech by Franziska Schubert (Arolsen Archives), the importance of EHRI and its projects for microarchives was explained. In the current project phase EHRI-3, these are to be integrated into the infrastructure and made more visible. EHRI has set itself the goal of reaching out to more microarchives so that they can also be listed in the portal using a publication tool. Various Austrian micro-archives then presented their work. Robert Streibel talked about his collection for researching the Jewish community and National Socialism in Krems and Hietzing; Andreas Sarközi presented the Cultural Association of Austrian Roma (Kulturverein österreichischer Roma), which contains a research and newspaper archive as well as a library. The Center for Queer History QWIEN with its holdings on queer history and its focus on the persecution of homosexuals under National Socialism was presented by Hannes Sulzenbacher. This was followed by a presentation by Michael Achenbach from RE.F.U.G.I.U.S., an association that has set the focus of commemorating the victims of Nazi rule in Rechnitz and compiles the collections of the association and the researchers. NS-Quellen was presented by Verena Pawlowsky. Here, for example, material on compensation issues and restitution was collected in the form of a database.

In a roundtable discussion, Gerhard Baumgartner, Albert Lichtblau and Harald Wendelin spoke about their research experiences in microarchives. They discussed the visibility of microarchives and how they could be preserved.The EHRI tools were then presented, including the Micro-Archive Publication Tool (MAPT), which can be used as a digital tool for online publication with standardized categorization and for the presentation of digitized material and metadata. The EHRI portal, blog and online editions were also presented - both a form of visibility for microarchives and an exchange with researchers and archivists. Finally, possibilities and ideas for collaboration were discussed in a panel discussion. The microarchive representatives emphasized that MAPT is too focused on digital collections. Many small archives simply do not have the human resources to create digital copies. Their concern is that the collections can be removed if the holdings are to be digitized. This would require low-threshold support from EHRI - as a kind of “service desk” to update the inventory descriptions and provide editorial support. The EHRI representatives want to take these important inputs to the next work package meeting, also with regard to recognition for the microarchives in a form of public relations work. The discussion showed that it is still very essential to explain the issue of visibility for the microarchives.

To coincide with the microarchives workshop, the S:I.M.O.N. Special Issue “Precarious Archives, Precarious Voices. Expanding Jewish Narratives from the Margins” was presented. This was produced as a follow-up to a workshop on “Precarious Archives, Precarious Voices”, in which previously hidden documents and narratives on Jewish history and the Shoah were presented and discussed, which have been collected in private collections, rediscovered archives and long unknown holdings in recent years. The individual contributions in the volume deal, for example, with methodological approaches to microarchives or personal approaches to archives from one’s own family.