A few newsworthy notes

I’ve been busy with life over the past week or so,and have several half-finished blog posts (and even more ideas) waiting in the wings,but wanted to point out a few archives-related news items in the meantime.

Recalling a Mission to Capture an Era’s Misery

“Migrant Mother,” Dorothea Lange’s image of a weathered,grimy Depression-era woman in California surrounded by her children,is one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century,as is “Fleeing a Dust Storm,” Arthur Rothstein’s shot of a farmer and his two young sons in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl whipped by the wind,a shack in the background.

The politics and the photographers who shaped those images under the auspices of the federal Farm Security Administration come to life in “Documenting the Face of America:Roy Stryker and the F.S.A./O.W.I. Photographers,” an hourlong documentary on most PBS stations Monday night. The film shows how Mr. Stryker turned a small government agency’s New Deal project to document poverty into a visual anthology of thousands of images of American life in the 1930s and early ’40s that helped shape modern documentary photography;more than 160,000 are now at the Library of Congress.

Full article here.

Under ‘Kafkaesque’Pressure,Heir to Kafka Papers May Yield Them

 Franz Kafka’s final wish before his death in 1924 — that his papers be burned — was famously defied by his friend,the writer Max Brod. The world got “The Trial,” “The Castle” and the adjective Kafkaesque;Mr. Brod got the papers.

When Mr. Brod fled to Tel Aviv from Prague on the last train out in 1939 as the Nazis rolled in,he had with him a suitcase full of Kafka’s documents.

Here,he took up with his secretary,and when he died in 1968,he bequeathed to her the remaining Kafka papers,as well as his own from a rich cultural career. For nearly 40 years,the secretary,Esther Hoffe,held the world of Kafka scholarship on tenterhooks,keeping the documents in her ground-floor apartment on Spinoza Street,some of them piled high on her desk (it was originally Mr. Brod’s),where she typed all day and took her meals.

The last time a scholar was permitted into the apartment was in the 1980s. Later,Ms. Hoffe sold the manuscript for “The Trial” for $2 million. No one knows what remains.

Full article here.

With regards to the Kafka papers,I’d like to open up a few fanciful questions:what value do you think the papers still hold? Obviously the creator did not wish them to be viewed or used by others. Further,the original order has possibly,perhaps probably been destroyed–no way to know for certain. Will it be possible to differentiate and delineate between papers created and used in different ways by Kafka,Brod,Hoffe,and possibly others?  Given the conditions,story,provenance,knowledge of these papers–how would you approach them? Understanding the wishes of the record creator:should the papers be preserved and opened to scholars at all?