In G – U: Arno Nadel’s diaries from 1941 to 1942

ABSTRACT From February 1942 on, Arno Nadel spent many hours a day as a forced laborer in the ‘Central Library’ of the ‘Reich Security Main Office’ in Berlin. Nadel was responsible for cataloguing looted books from all over Europe – most taken from various Jewish communities, many written in Hebrew. Perpetually threatened, Arno Nadel kept secret diaries until he was deported to Auschwitz in March 1943. In digitalized form, the extant diary notebooks comprise approximately 1033 sheets. This article describes the notebooks as both an archive and a thought diary, aiming to decipher some aspects of the materials’ texture.

meaning 'what has been robbed and lost'. 5But the Latin letter G could also stand for 'goden', a code word for the Germans in Nadel's diaries.A diary entry from (presumably) 24 May 1942 suggests that the abbreviation, while open to interpretation, is by no means indeterminate.Here, Arno Nadel notes various possible meanings (Figure 3): 'G.U.God's monster, great injustice, mysterious clock, the horror of primordial time, the hideout of ganovim [thieves], blessed shores, the stammering of Urania-' ('G.U.Gottes Ungeheuer, grosses Unrecht, geheimnisvolle Uhr, Grauen der Urzeit, Ganowim [Diebe]-Unterschlupf, gesegnete Ufer, Gestammel der Urania -') -The place of the looted books thus becomes inscribed in the diary as a cryptic sign.The stream of writing, under permanent threat, springs from this very place; the acts of writing are wrested from it and resist it.
In one of the diary entries, Arno Nadel mentions his 'three main works: TON, Dionysos, and the G -U.' For the author, his diaries (which is a term he himself chooses), -his 'G -U notebooks' ('G -U-Hefte') or 'autobiography' ('Selbstbiographie'), 'this G -U book', 'my trace on earth' ('meine Erdenspur'), as he also calls them in July 1942 -for Nadel, his diaries are on a par with his collection of poems Der Ton, published in 1921, and with his volume of poetry Der weissagende Dionysos.A part of Dionysus appeared in print in 1925, and Nadel continued to work on it in the following years, until his deportation to Auschwitz on 9 March 1943.
Arno Nadel, who was born on 3 October 1878 in Vilnius into an orthodox Jewish family, was, as Jascha Nemtsov enumerates, a 'poet, philosopher, playwright, scholar of religion, translator, painter and graphic artist, composer, scholar of music and literature, ethnologist, choral conductor, pianist, organist, and music publicist'. 6His secret diary entries, written in the time of utmost distress after 1941, testify to the immense richness of his productive intellectual life and to his insistent desire to learn.-After 1945, one of Arno Nadel's daughters, Detta Okun, who had escaped to New York, received the diaries.As Erich Gottgetreu reports in the Bulletin of the Leo Baeck Institute in 1975, 7 she gave him the six volumes of diary entries, to be entrusted to the Manuscripts Department of the Jewish National and University Library in March 1973.The notebooks, which are small -approximately 12 × 18 cm -are portable and easy to hide.They are covered in handwriting, sometimes in ink but mostly in pencil, and the writing mostly runs from left to right.Three bundles are listed in the National Library's online index as a 'type-written summary of diaries'. 8Encompassing 243 numbered typescript pages, it consists of three parts, written in 1942.
The Excel spreadsheet presents the available digitized materials as a list, which unrolls its digital series of images in linear form and tends to overwrite the uncertainty of the chronological sequence.This holds true for a bundle of 131 sheets in particular, which include individual diary pages and loose slips of paper in various formats, framed by two handwritten sheets that refer to the location G -U (Figure 4).In the digital view, it is hardly possible to decide whether the sheets in this bundle, or more precisely, in this folder are bound or loose.
Where the question of genre is concerned, Arno Nadel's diaries, too, 'can be considered both a historical document -an ego-document or personal testimony -and a literary text in the form of autobiography, a writing exercise or literary testing ground'. 9The diary's hybrid character manifests itself not only in its intermediate position between a historical document and a literary text but also in its oscillation 'between the private and the public and between the individual and the paradigmatic'. 10ut beyond that, we can interpret Arno Nadel's diaries as a vast archive in and of themselves.According to the National Library's Excel spreadsheet, they encompass approximately 1033 sheets.Their enormous wealth of contexts and references, their linguistic plurality -to name but the Hebrew language or the musical notation -, as well as their language of abbreviations and codes, which results from the endangered situation but perhaps also from lack of time, are overwhelming, a fact hardly reflected by the mere quantity of digital images.The diaries form a collage that interweaves sharply defined fragments, recorded thoughts, transcribed quotes, and notations of dreams with bibliographical references, drafts of poems, notes about daily life, and brief reports of 'terrible things happening nearby' ('Furchtbares in nächster Nähe'), as Nadel writes in May 1942. 11For the most part, the entries are written in German, in Latin script occasionally interspersed with Hebrew script and sometimes also with musical notation or drawings.The painful, precise, often seemingly breathless quality of the sentences shows the immense wealth of Arno Nadel's intellectual and spiritual world.His writing is replete with references and allusions to literature, art, music, and the philosophy of Maimonides, Kant, and Spinoza, among others, as well as to religious texts, to Hasidism, to mysticism, but also to contemporary debates, such as Ludwig Klages.At the same time, we find -to cite Andreas Kilcher -'patterns of interpretation of a catastrophic history' 12 in the diaries.As Professor Nomi Halpern (Yad Vashem) notes, 'The text includes only here and there remarks on the situation in Germany in 1941-1942.Most of the text refers to ideas which he expressed in his books Der Ton: Die Lehre von Gott und Leben and Der weissagende Dionysos.' 13 Therefore, I would argue that we can call Nadel's diaries not only an archive but also a thought diary.

Writing and script as protection
Writing, script as protection -this notion takes on a dual meaning, since writing protects the writer, is a means of survival, but is also life-threatening.If, as Guy Miron has shown, 'the ever-growing experience of shrinking space -first in public and then also in private life -motivated German Jews to turn to the "space of writing"', 14 then Nadel's writing, his act of recording and copying under the conditions of forced labor in the RSHA library, bears witness to this experience in an exceptional way.We can surmise that in a certain sense, Nadel's act of writing approaches the purpose that Rachael Langford and Russel West have ascribed to the practice of recording daily events in the Lodz ghetto: 'The ghetto journal is clearly a mode of creating meaning in a meaningless world and thus of maintaining subjectivity in the face of its annihilation, a way of restoring selfhood in the face of the "dehumanization" mentioned in the opening entry'. 15But writing also protects script.A sentence that Arno Nadel notes in When we see how completely Nadel's handwriting covers the small space on the double page of the diary (Figure 5) from the spring of 1942 -and this applies to most of the handwritten diary pages -, the third double page of another notebook, begun in the early summer of 1942, seems all the more significant: (Figure 6).Here, we find a quotation from the Talmud: 'A small coin in an empty barrel calls: Kish, kish, i.e., it rattles loudly, whereas a coin in a barrel full of coins is not heard' ('Das ganz volle Büchslein schweigt fein still.Wenn aber ein Heller drin ist, so schreits Kisch Kisch (Talmud)').If we consider the material appearance -the distribution of the ink script on the page -we are struck by the discrepancy or the interplay between the three lines of the quotation and the surrounding empty space.
But what do we really see, and do we see anything different in the digital image than if we were looking at the original pages at the National Library?One question that certainly arises when we examine the double page of the diary, regardless of whether we are looking at the sheets in digitized form (or as a paper printout) or at the physical original, is how we might interpret the correlation or co-presence of the quotation and the empty space surrounding it.Would one possibility be to interpret the double page as a work of art, as Yuval Shaked has suggested? 16Like the rest in music, the white space serves as an interruption.But to allow for an interpretation, we would first have to cover the radius of the contexts of knowledge that the Talmudic quotation entails, which, as we may assume, Arno Nadel knew well.This indicates the abovementioned problem of contextual scope, which makes it so difficult and demanding to read Nadel's diaries.

How does digitization transform the value of historicity?
This leads us to my general claim that digitization confronts us with specific requirements and challenges of contextualising archival materials.The question of what we see on the computer is accompanied by the question of the epistemic reverse side of images and 'surfaces'.And, more broadly, this begs the question of the value of historicity when we deal with archival materials, and when we formulate our research questions: How does digitization transform the value of historicity?Here, a whole set of issues arises: Does digitization, given the sheer mass of digitized material, not only overwhelm us but also create the illusion of comprehensiveness?Does it insinuate that it is possible 'to have seen everything'?What does the reduction to the optical signify, or conversely: what is the relationship between what is haptic and cognition?-Does digitization obliterate the place of the individual sheet or the individual note in the 'material space' -or does it, on the contrary, become fixed in the linear sequence of the image files, organized in columns and lists?Or, to put it somewhat more broadly: If we follow Boris Groys' argument that archiving transforms every copy into an original, since archiving 'reterritorializes the copy' 17 -what does this mean for the digitized materials?-Or, to pose the question somewhat differently: If we understand the transmission 'from remains to archive' as a transformation process in which the fragments left behind are transformed into documents, 18 which in turn are transformed into archival material: Does digitization efface this distinction?
It strikes me as significant that the terminology linked to the discussion of quantities and to issues of interpretation (Erschliessungsfragen) has changed -for instance, when we refer to 'amounts of information' (Informationsmengen) or speak about 'the information contained in the sources' ('die in den Quellen enthaltenen Informationen').This suggests a conceptual and perhaps also epistemic shift toward paradigms of information theory.Linked to this are questions about -abilities, with Samuel Weber 19 -about investigability and searchability, about how both are technically designed and determined.

Reconstructing networks of correspondence -place names
One hopeful assumption is that digitization -as opposed to the Mappenordnung, the 'ordered folder' -could help us to reconstruct networks of correspondence.For instance: Where do third parties speak about an author?In which letters of others does a certain work become the subject of conversation?This can also be applied to the question of how places, or references to places, correspond to one another.
Piaski is one such place name that appears in the Arno Nadel archives in the National Library.The archival document bearing this name is a letter from the Piaski Ghetto, dated 9 April 1942.In lines typed closely together on two pages, a writer, who signs with the initial 'R.', reports on his or her situation in the Piaski Ghetto near Lublin (Figure 7).As you can see, the abbreviation 'L.H.' designates the letter's addressee.To date, I have not been able to find out who wrote the letter and to whom it is addressed.This letter in Arno Nadel's digitized archive is a chance discovery (Zufallsfund).When I first looked through the columns of the Excel spreadsheet, it was the first thing that caught my eye.Of course, coincidence and the unconscious are intertwined here.But if we think of the archive as a place for coincidences, the question also arises whether and how coincidence, Zufall, emerges differently under the conditions of digitization.
A passage corresponding to the letter document appears in Nadel's diary from 1942, but it does not resolve the meaning of the two abbreviations of letter writer and addressee.The following passage, written in June or July 1942, speaks to the question of a correspondence between place names: 'As I watched the green movement of the afternoon summer sun, [I] thought about how now, at the same time, my brothers [books] in Lietzm. in Riga, in Piske in Warsaw are living and dying, how they're staring into warm nature with a suffering far greater than mine, and [. ..]' ('Dachte als ich die gruene Bewegung der Nachmittags Sommer Sonne schaute, wie jetzt, zu gleicher Zeit meine Brueder [Buecher] in Lietzm. in Riga, in Piske in Warschau leben und sterben, wie sie, unendlich viel leidvoller als ich, in die warme Natur starren und [. ..]') (Figure 8).
The name Piaski, here 'Piske', encounters Lietzmannstadt, Riga, and Warsaw in the list of places.You can see the mistyped word 'my books' (meine Buecher) in the typescript (in the second line): it is crossed out and corrected by hand to read 'my brothers' (meine Brueder).-It is worth noting that Arno Nadel emphasizes in another diary entry, likely from October 1942, that the books which the Nazis looted from the libraries of the European and German Jewish communities remain the Jewish communities' property. 20The "hidden 'reference library'" -die "versteckte 'Handbibliothek'" In the summer of 1942, Nadel mentions a 'hidden "reference library"' that he had compiled for himself in G -U and kept 'anxiously' hidden.He calls it a 'sanctuary' and notes his relief that 'no one [. ..] touched the sanctuary.' 21This passage may exemplify his effort to maintain intellectual and spiritual continuity during these days, weeks and months.Without negating the 'divide between experience and description' 22 that characterizes the diary's writing practice, a citation from the typescript, in lines written closely together and dated 15 October 1942, may illustrate the spiritual and sensory significance that handling ancient Hebrew manuscripts, both intellectually and haptically, holds for Nadel: '[. ..] and immerse myself in old manuscripts to chase my thoughts away from my innermost sorrow.I try to take delight in the ancient Hebrew letters, which emanate such wonderful proximity to God.Old, old manuscripts, breathing and living so differently from old print works.All of antiquity with its individual force bursts in.It is rapturous to see the spirits resurrected.No wonder, if we envision the Faust manipulations and the Kabbalists' measures.'(‚[. ..] und vertiefe mich in alte Handschriften, um meine Gedanken von meinem innerlichsten Kummer fort zu scheuchen.Ich suche mich an den uralten hebraeischen Buchstaben zu ergetzen, die eine so wunderbare Gottesnaehe ausstrahlen.Alte, alte Manuskripe [sic!], noch ganz anders hauchend und lebend als alte Druckwerke.Das ganze Altertum mit seiner individuellen Kraft bricht herein.Es ist eine Wonne, die Geister wieder erstehen zu sehen.Kein Wunder, wenn man die Faust-Manipulationen sich vergegenwaertigt und die Massnahmen der Kabbalisten.') 23 9 April 1942, Arno Nadel writes '9.I am as tired as a horse that has been pulling hard all day.I must have walked back and forth a hundred times, packing boxes and hauling books.And if I stole a quarter of an hour here and there, I studied like a madman.To what end?To forget it again?' (‚9.Ich bin müde wie ein Pferd, das den ganzen Tag, schwer gezogen hat.Ich lief wohl hundertmal hin und her und packte Kisten, schleppte Bücher.Und wenn ich hie und da eine Viertelstunde abstahl, lernte ich wie ein Wilder.Wozu?Um es wieder zu vergessen?') 24 inventing the rhetorical figure 'Uhl', an addressable 'you', Nadel is able to transcend the condition of solitude in the diary's conversation with himself.On 31 May 1942, he notes: 'Invention of Uhl.Unknown reader.-UL -with an H (saint) nestled in between.That is the Uhl, who can also be a nightingale.Who is allowed to criticize and praise.' ('Erfindung des Uhl.Unbekannter Leser.-UL -und dazwischen ein H (Heiliger) geschoben.Das ist die Uhl, die zugleich eine Nachtigall sein kann.Die tadeln und loben darf.') 25 It may be that the author uses this cipher for the instance of an imaginary reader to translate an allusion or the fragment of a memory that touches on his friendship with Martin Buber: In a letter to Buber dated 20 January 1920, Nadel called him 'my first sacred reader' (‚mein erster heiliger Leser'). 26any gaps and questions remain about Nadel's writing process in his G -U notebooks: For instance, the relationship of his handwritten daily notes in notebooks to the typescripts, which, as I mentioned previously, are listed in the National Library's online index as 'type written summary of diaries'.From the perspective of literary studies, I would refer to all the diary and archival materials as 'avant-texte'.The term 'avant-texte' designates the material ensemble of notes, sketches, drafts, and manuscripts.It no longer sees materiality merely as a functional 'carrier' of a text that has yet to be created.The assumption that the avant-texte inheres in the text and vice versa abolishes the separation between them.But this then raises the question of whether digitization does not contribute to reducing materiality to its function as a mere 'carrier' of writing or signs or 'information'.
To put it another way, does digitization undo precisely this interplay of avant-texte and text -or, to the contrary, does it attract attention to this entanglement?To do justice to the individuality and singularity of Nadel's G -U diaries as a 'scriptural work' would mean making the texture of his writing visible, which fuses the practices of collecting, chronicling, and witnessing with the creation of a tightly woven and extensive fabric of intertextual references.