What not to digitize: the meaning of the empty pages in the archive of Arieh Ludwig Strauss

ABSTRACT

This essay considers one decision in the archive-digitization process, namely the decision not to scan empty pages. Using the empty pages in a notebook that belonged to Ludwig Strauss (Aachen, 1892 – Jerusalem, 1953) as an example, I argue that the context matters. The fact that Strauss’s notebook is bilingual, containing materials in both German and Hebrew, shifts the significance of the empty pages. I locate the notebook in relation to Strauss’s correspondence with the Hebrew poet Leah Goldberg, and briefly read one his poems, ‘Hymn to Asia,’ that appears in the notebook in two drafts.

KEYWORDS:

• Digitization
• archive
• bilingualism
• Ludwig Strauss
• translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This glosses over an entire debate in the field of media theory on digital ontology and the nature of the digital. See for example: Alexander R. Galloway and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “Shaky Distinctions: A Dialogue on the Digital and the Analog,” e-flux Journal 121, October 2021, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/121/423015/shaky-distinctions-a-dialogue-on-the-digital-and-the-analog/ (accessed November 12, 2023). Taking a cue from discussions of the term in the field of cultural anthropology, such as Hannah Knox and Antonia Walford, “Digital Ontology,” Fieldsights, Theorizing the Contemporary, March 24, 2016, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/digital-ontology [accessed November 12, 2023], one might also think about digital ontology in terms of social relations. This would enable us to think about the labor performed by digitizers, and its relation to labor conditions in academia, libraries, and publishing, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

2. Immanuel Strauss, Childhood Recollection, NLI, ARC. Ms. Var. 424 7 85.

3. Ludwig Strauss and Tuvia Ruebner, Bedarkhei hasifrut: ’iyunim besifrut Yisrael uvesifrut ha’amim (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1959); Martin Buber and Ludwig Strauss, Briefwechsel Martin Buber-Ludwig Strauss, 1913–1953, ed. Tuvia Ruebner (Frankfurt a.M: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1990); Ludwig Strauss, Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden, ed. Tuvia Ruebner and Hans Otto Horch, 4 vols. (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998).

4. Ludwig Strauss, Gedichte, NLI, ARC. Ms. Var. 424 01 7b.

5. Birgit Erdle and Annegret Pelz, “Intentionally Left Blank – Raum Für Notizen: Aufzeichnungsformen Und -Materialien in Europäisch-Jüdischer Literatur. Einleitung,” Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies 6, no. 1 (2019): 3.

6. Giddon Ticotsky, Haor beshuley heanan: hekerut meḥudeshet im yetsirata veḥayeha shel Leah Goldberg, (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuḥad-Sifriyat Poalim, 2011); Yfaat Weiss, Nesia venesia meduma: Leah Goldberg begermania 1930–1933 (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2014); and Natasha Gordinsky, Beshlosha nofim: yetsirata hamukdement shel Leah Goldberg, (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2016).

7. The letters from Goldberg to Strauss are in the Strauss archive at the National Library: NLI, ARC. Ms. Var. 424 06 234; The letters from Strauss to Goldberg are at the Gnazim Institute in Tel Aviv: 274 5687/1–5707/1. These materials were first shared with me by Giddon Ticotsky.

8. ARC. Ms. Var. 424 01 1, https://www.nli.org.il/en/archives/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL990047759770205171/NLI.

9. ARC. Ms. Var. 424 01 7b, https://www.nli.org.il/en/archives/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL990047750150205171/NLI.

10. Rachel Seelig, “The Middleman: Ludwig Strauss’s German – Hebrew Bilingualism,” Prooftexts 33, no. 1 (2013): 79.

11. Rachel Seelig, “Unsettling the Land: Ludwig Strauss’s Journey from German Romanticism to Neoclassical Hebrew,” MLN 128, no. 3 (2013): 530–52; Lina Barouch, “Ludwig Strauss: Polyglossia and Parody in Palestine,” Naharaim 6, no. 1 (2012): 121–47; Lina Barouch, ‘”Hölderlin in Jerusalem: Buber and Strauss on Poetry and the Limits of Dialogue,” Naharaim 8, no. 2 (2014): 289–307; and Jan Kühne, “A German-Hebrew French Kiss: On Bilingual Homophony and Other Multilingual Intimacies in German-Jewish Literature,” Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies 6, no. 1 (2019): 61–89.

12. Strauss uses an odd Hebrew locution in this sentence, which is difficult to transpose into English: ישבר יופץ הפח ואני אמלט.

13. עבדתי גברתי כשבעה סבלים/לשאת זה המשא הקל שבקלים.

14. In this letter Strauss describes translation dilemmas such as his translation of Goldberg’s term ‘shalev’ (calm), for which Strauss considers the German terms ruhig and seelig, trying to capture the sense of being admitted into ‘a great, cloud-like silence’ that he hears in her poem.

15. Gili Izikovich, “Hameni’a leshinuy ḥoq Hasifriyah Haleumit hu neqamah,” Haaretz, February 26, 2023, https://www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/literature/2023-02-26/ty-article/.premium/00000186-8e42-d9e0-a5f6-efde151d0000; Oded Ben Yehuda, “Hasifriyah Haleumit bitlah et halogo haḥadash shelah,” Haaretz, October 1, 2023, https://www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/art/design/2023-10-01/ty-article/0000018a-ead0-d12f-afbf-ebd50aba0000.

16. Benjamin Balint, Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019); Elif Batuman, “Kafka’s Last Trial,” The New York Times Magazine, September 26, 2010; Judith Butler, “Who Owns Kafka?” London Review of Books, March 2011.

17. ARC. 4 × 2000 05 34, https://www.nli.org.il/en/archives/NNL_ARCHIVE_AL997007757178405171/NLI.

18. On Kafka’s Hebrew, most recently: Jan Kühne, “Kafkas hebräische Botschaft: Zur Gesetzmäßigkeit homophonischer Überlieferung,” Yearbook for European Jewish Literature Studies 9, no. 1 (2022): 154–74.

19. All of the letters are quotes from: Peter Huchel, Letters to Ludwig Strauss (HS.2006.0009), Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. The English translation is mine.

20. Ibid.

21. Rachel Seelig, “Unsettling the Land: Ludwig Strauss’s Journey from German Romanticism to Neoclassical Hebrew,” MLN 128, no. 3 (2013)

22. Arie Dubnov and Rephael Stern, “A Part of Asia or Apart from Asia? Zionist Perceptions of Asia, 1947–1956,” in Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Studies and the Historiography of Zionism, ed. Stefan Vogt, Derek J Penslar, and Arieh Saposnik, The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2023).

23. Rachel Leow, “A Missing Peace: The Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing, 1952 and the Emotional Making of Third World Internationalism,” Journal of World History 30, no. 1 (2019): 42.

24. “Speech by Pnina Feinhaus,” in Bulletin of the Asian Pacific Peace Conference (Asia-Pacific Peace Conference, Beijing, 1952), 144–45. I thank Rachel Leow for sharing this source with me.

25. In the Talmud it is used in this sense, but also, importantly, with the connotation of a political song of praise for a King. An example of the former is Shemot Rabba, 45, quoted in Avraham Even-Shoshan, Hamilon heḥadash, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1971), 516. An example of the latter is Midrash Tehilim, 1, 4, which describes a King for which a legion sings a ‘himnon.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Na’ama Rokem

Na’ama Rokem is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Her book, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature, was published in 2013. Together with Amir Eshel, she co-edited the volume German and Hebrew: Histories of a Conversation, a special issue of Prooftexts. She has published articles on Franz Kafka, Erich Auerbach, Leah Goldberg, and M.Y. Berdichevsky, among others.