what comes next, nobody knows

current update June 2023

Milford / Mühlfelder archive transferred to the Leo Baeck Institute at the Center for Jewish History in New York

Very happy news that the physical Milford archive, catalogued by Scott Denham and his students at Davidson College between November 2021 and October 2022, has been given by the family to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. Over the next months Denham will work with LBI archivists to transfer to LBI the finding aid and the approximately 5,000 digitized images of the photos, letters, documents, and objects in the archive. Through the LBI and the Center for Jewish History the archive will be available to scholars and students for research. This work, as noted in detail below, was supported by the Federal Republic of Germany through the German Embassy’s Campus Weeks Program (2021) and by various sources at Davidson College (2021 and 2022), including the Bremer Fund for German Studies. Students who helped with the cataloging project are Claire Chapman, Breila Fuller, Konrad Hector, Jacob Hertzinger, Anders Holmes, Grace Isernia, Shen Luo, Nina Seijn, and Eva Schooler. And those who took part in the summer research trip are Claire Chapman, Breila Fuller, Anders Holmes, Grace Isernia, and Nina Seijn, from Davidson, and Flora Milford from Beloit College.

Mendel / Mühlfelder / Milford project continues to receive grant funding

Good News! Davidson College student Breila Fuller has just received a Fulbright grant for a year of study and research in Germany, September 2023 – July 2024. Breila, Davidson class of 2023, will be at visiting student at the Historisches Institut at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and also collaborate on research and programming with the public historian Jörg Kaps in the nearby city of Arnstadt. Many generations of Mendels and Mühlfelders have family roots in Arnstadt, as you can see here

Some of Breila’s early work in the Milford and Mendel family archives was supported by funding donated by Dr. C. Christopher Bremer, Davidson class of 1960, who has been a consistent and enthusiastic supporter of German Studies at Davidson for decades. Breila and Chris share a moment of congratulations and gratitude at a departmental Deutsches Frühstück on 31 March 2023 in Davidson.

Grants supporting the wide-ranging work of participants in the archive project include:

• Fulbright Fellowship
• The Charles A. Dana Professorship in German Studies
• Pollack-Krasner Grant (2)
• Davidson Research Initiative Group Investigations Grant (for Berlin and summer research)
• The Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany Campus Weeks Grant (November 2021)
• The Bacca Foundation Artist In Residence Program at Davidson College
• The Davidson Arts Across the Curriculum Enrichment Fund
• The Clark Ross Innovation Fund
• The Bremer Fund in German Studies (for the Nov 2021 symposium in Davidson and the summer 2022 symposium in Berlin)
• The Cox Endowment in the Humanities
• The Stories Yet to Be Told project at Davidson College

Elias Mendel’s Pollack-Krasner Fellowship – Berlin work

Eli received a prestigious Pollack-Krasner Fellowship to pursue artmaking for 2022-23. Some of that his happening in Berlin in the fall of 2022. See his pages on that here.

key happenings summer 2022

• August 19-23. Gideon Mendel and Eli Mendel met with Bruno Mendel in Zutphen, The Netherlands to listen and share stories and touch the next archival island of the archival archipelago. More archive to catalogue.
  More stories from the archive.
  More stories.
  More life in the archive.
  More life.
  
  “It was such a privilege to have these unforgettable, poignant days with Bruno. This journey was undertaken with @elimendel as part of our ongoing family archive project, provisionally titled ‘What Comes Next Nobody Knows’. We hope to make accessible the ‘archipelago of archives’ that have emerged from relatives around the world.”
  
  “Continuing the journey of our family art archive project uncovering our families history In collaboration with @gideonmendel. Thanks to the many who have helped us along the way.“
  See their full instagram posts here and here.

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• August 1. Eli Mendel projects his palimpsest images and angels onto his grandmother’s house in Berlin. Some views below, full posts here and here.

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Berlin

• We met in BERLIN for a symposium and exhibition and performance on July 30 and 31
  Scott Denham, Gideon Mendel, and Eli Mendel organized and hosted a small scholarly symposium and a one-day exhibition and performance to present a snapshot of current scholarly and public history work and creative interventions related to the massive Archive Project, an archipelago of family archives of the Mendel, Brüll, and Milford archives.
  • here is the exhibition and performance statement for 31 July
  • for now, here is an early working script of the new play “Humans in the Archve” (pdf download)
  • Flora Milford presented her “Letters to Opa”
    
    some impressions

• see Eli Mendel’s instagram for some of his creative work and artist statements from the weekend
• see Gideon Mendel’s instagram for some of his creative work and artist statements from the weekend
  
• 10 weeks this summer student archivists Anders Holmes, Breila Fuller, Claire Chapman, Grace Isernia, and Nina Seijn from Davidson College and Flora Milford from Beloit College sought out places and spaces in the archive and visited other city and state archives in Offenbach, Mannheim, Gurs and Drancy, Vienna, Lichtenfels, Arnstadt, and Berlin.
  • some outcomes of their summer research work:
    • Breila Fuller is undertaking a full-year honors thesis in German Studies at Davidson College. She is focusing on aspects of of intentionality and internal curation of the Milford/Mühlfelder archive by Toni Milford in order to understand the autonomy of self-narration through informal portrait photographs, photo albums, and notes to the albums; more specifically she is interested in the change of self-presentation through time from 1925-1937 in Germany and after forced emigration 1938-1980. Breila is also applying to continue her research through a Fulbright or DAAD research/study grant at the Historisches Institut at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and with public history fieldwork in Arnstadt with the support of the Arnstadt mayor Frank Spilling and others.
    • Grace Isernia plans to undertake a summer internship with the Schulamt in Thüringen, with the support of school psychologist Berit Fischer, exploring history education in Thüringen.
    • Anders Holmes is deepening his study of German language with a semester of study in Vienna.
    • Flora Milford is learning German with a semester of study in Marburg.
  • The students made some great connections, in particular with Jörg Kaps, Beauftragter für das jüdische Erbe der Stadt Arnstadt, and Christine Wittenbauer, city Archivist in Lichtenfels. Their relationships with these and other archivists, historians, and public history workers will continue into the future.

keep scrolling down for more information about this project

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“Welcome to our archive. The archive we carry. This is both a personal story of a family and a resource for the world. This is a way to commune with the ghosts of our past and see the shadows of our future.  The archive is alive. Reach out and touch the stream, the myriad of stories, of joys, of tears, of war, of love, and of living. Look up and see the mosaic of history as we build this narrative, an attempt to look back while still facing forward. ‘We invite you to mourn with us, laugh with us, cry with us and see with us.’”
Elias and Gideon Mendel

This website is a temporary resource set up for a series of online discussions, held in May 2021. Scroll down the website to see all artefacts discussed in the salons, starting from the last session.  You can view the recordings of all four sessions via the bar on the top right alongside some additional resources including animations and creative responses.

Since May 2021, the site also documents ongoing work and exploration with the archive, including a symposium and artist residency at Davidson College in November 2021, and new discovery and processing work, combined with teaching and learning throughout spring and summer 2022.

The page records the first public engagement with a private German Jewish family archive of immense scope, depth, and complexity. This begins with a document from 1746 bestowing an ancestor the right to travel and trade, then traces first-hand experiences of the Franco-Prussian War, the trenches of World War One, bourgeois life in the Weimar Republic, tragedy, trauma and survival in the Holocaust, and finally emigration and life in South Africa. Since the project began our archive has grown exponentially through contact with relatives around the world, both in volume and the history it covers.  It is a vast and interlinking collection that has been described as ‘one of the most comprehensive representations of German Jewish family history.’

Comprehending this archive, which spans five generations and as many continents, is an exciting challenge. Through our unique approach we are proposing a ground-breaking series of works, that will contribute to the conversation about the Holocaust, Jewish life, identity and social justice. We envisage a variety of iterations including a book, an exhibition, a video installation and documentary film using the archive as our lens to build this mosaic.

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What’s next

go to information about the BERLIN SYMPOSIUM AND EXHIBITION July 30-31

go to what’s next right now

[updated 22 June 2022]

updated details on the in-person workshops and programming from November and notes on upcoming work

November 2021 events at Davidson College

On Friday 5 November, Saturday 6 November, and Sunday 7 November 2021, Davidson College hosted workshops and presentations in person with the new Milford (Mühlfelder) Family Archive (connected to the Mendel family a few generations back), which was transferred physically from Brooklyn to Davidson by our departmental program coordinator Meg Sawicki. We were delighted to welcome the Milford siblings Matthew, Kate, and Nell, who are the keepers of this archive. The Milford archive is yet another place to land among the archipelago that we broadly refer to as the Mendel Archive Project. Students and archivists engaged with the new materials. The weekend workshops focused on the new archive and on questions and examples of engaging with the archive creatively, with attention to new creative work by Gideon Mendel, who was present for the Milford archive workshops, and by Eli Mendel, who was able to arrived on November 8, the first day after the end of the UK-USA pandemic travel ban.

The arrival of the archive and family members was preceded by an exhibition of posters from the 1,700 Years of Jewish Life in German-speaking Lands project, on prominent display in the college union for three weeks.

Have a look at this animation of the Milford family tree being sketched on that weekend.

Both Gideon and Eli Mendel gave presentations, on Monday 8 November and Tuesday 9 November, respectively.

We are honored that Consul General Melanie Moltmann and Honorary Consul Reinhard von Hennigs of the Federal Republic of Germany diplomatic corps joined us for the November 9th event and offered words of welcome and introduction. Davidson College Jewish Student Union members Aria Een, Olivia Howard, Josh Lodish, Ephi Light, and Eva Schooler planned the program with Eli Mendel. Rabbi Tracy Klirs offered the Eil Malei Rachamim memorial prayer (specifically a version of it written to honor Shoah victims) in Hebrew and English.

Under the auspices of the German Embassy’s Campus Weeks program with the theme “Jewish Life in Germany: Time to Act” we have again dug into the archive together, saw and discussed creative interventions, heard about new responses and reflections, and explored our collective responses to newly accessible translated documents, letters, and journals (all circulated beforehand). We are grateful for the financial support of the German Federal Government.

The November workshops were supported by grants from

• The Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany
• The Bacca Foundation Artist In Residence Program at Davidson College
• The Davidson Arts Across the Curriculum Enrichment Fund
• The Clark Ross Innovation Fund
• The Bremer Fund in German Studies
• The Cox Endowment in the Humanities
• The Stories Yet to Be Told project at Davidson College

What’s next?

• as of 22 June 2022

This spring semester January – May I created a new archive theory and practice seminar. In that seminar, nine Davidson students and I processed the Milford – Mühlfelder archive. We created accession numbers, arranged the catalogued items in archival folders and boxes, and created a finding aid for the Milford archive.

We are grateful to have been able to welcome for consultation and discussion Professor Teresa Walch (Feb 28), a historian from UNC-Greensboro; Professor Sheer Ganor (Mar 28), a historian at the University of Minnesota; and Frank Mecklenburg (Apr 25), Senior Historian at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. The Leo Baeck Institute’s Collections section will likely be the recipient of the Milford-Mühlfelder archive at some future date. The Charles Milford (Klaus Mühlfelder) papers are already housed in the archive at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York.

Earlier this spring, we connected with Flora Milford, a family member who is a direct descendant of the main figures in the archive. Flora is a student at Beloit College. See Flora at the lower center here, in the line from Matt, Karl Hans Mühlfelder who is Ken Milford after his name change in 1944, and his mother Toni Mühlfelder / Milford, née Eichenberg. Toni’s mother Flora Eichenberg née Mendel (1873-1916) is Flora Milford’s namesake.

Five Davidson students from the archive seminar — Breila Fuller, Grace Isernia, Claire Chapman, Nina Seijn, and Anders Holmes — applied for and received competitive funding through the Davidson Research Initiative for a summer travel and research project. Likewise, Flora Milford applied for and received funding from the Weissberg Program in Human Rights and Social Justice at Beloit College. Those six students are in Europe for ten weeks to visit and document sites, local archives, spaces, and traces of the Mendel, Brüll, and Milford – Mühlfelder archives during summer 2022. Using some of the tools they learned from Teresa Walch and Sheer Ganor, as well as following through questions from family members, they will be attentive to the “topography of genocide” (Andrew Charlesworth) and the “presence of the absence” (Omer Bartov). We are deeply grateful for Davidson’s and Beloit’s generous and substantial support for this international student research experience.

continuing Milford – Mühlfelder archive work

We scanned most all artifacts from the archive, mainly in May and June, with financial support from the Davidson College E. H. Little Library. Archive students were joined by Flora Milford, who got to see the archive processing work and who also took part in the scanning. They were compensated for that work. Many thanks to Library Director Lisa Forrest and to the Stories Yet To Be Told initiative at Davidson College for providing funding for that scanning work.

Throughout the summer of 2022 we will continue to edit and refine the finding aid, complete adding links to the scans, and finish up rotating and cropping the scanned images.

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BERLIN SYMPOSIUM AND EXHIBITION July 30-31

(updated 1 August 2022)

On Saturday July 30th and Sunday July 31st we held a symposium and exhibition in four parts.

Saturday 30 July events were held at Stiftung Neue Verantwortung.
Sunday 31 July events were held at ARTCO Galerie Berlin.

We are grateful to Stiftung Neue Verantwortung and to ARTCO Gallery for hosting.

Part one

on Saturday in the morning 10-12 on 30 July, was a series of presentations about the archive project. Participants included

• the academic organizer Scott Denham
• the research project students Anders Holmes, Claire Chapman, Breila Fuller, Grace Isernia, and Nina Seijn, and Flora Milford
• Gideon Mendel and Eli Mendel; members of the Milford family Matt Milford, Kate Milford, and Nell Dority
• Jörg Kaps, historian, activist, and caretaker of the legacy of Jewish German families who were expelled from Arnstadt (Beauftragter für das jüdische Erbe der Stadt Arnstadt), the town that is the central place for the Mendel family. Jörg’s slides from his presentation are here.
• author Thomas Medicus, who is new to the project. Thomas Medicus is uniquely situated to offer remarks because of his extensive work in his own family’s history in the town of Gunzenhausen, which he presents in his book Heimat. eine Suche; his discovery and publication of a photographer’s massive archive of images documenting everyday life in mid-twentieth century in Gunzenhausen (Verhängnisvoller Wandel); as well as his work as a prizewinning biographer.

Attendees saw these artifacts in preparation for the weekend:
• go here to see the Mendel archive artifacts;
• some items from the Milford – Mühlfelder archive, which is still being processed:

Part two –

Saturday in the afternoon 3-5 on 30 July, began with Thomas Medicus’s presentation on German memory culture and politics, and his response to the archive work we heard about in the morning. Then we had open discussion for a couple hours.

Part three – ARTCO Galerie

on Sunday afternoon 2pm – 4pm 31 July, we saw four creative interventions in the archive by the students and playwright and theater maker Samer Al-Saber and a team of professional actors, writer Flora Milford, Gideon Mendel, and Eli Mendel

[Video and photos documenting these creative works will be here soon. For now, here is an early script of the play by Samer Al-Saber.]

What comes next nobody knows.

INTERVENTIONS IN OUR ARCHIVE
Please join us for a one afternoon exhibition, discussion and performance from three generations of the German Jewish diaspora: Gideon Mendel, Elias Mendel, voices from the archive and the archivists, and Flora Milford.

Programme
• The Archive We Carry: A presentation of the ‘archipelago of archives’ from around the world that form the basis of this interdisciplinary family project.
• Charcoal Tears: A series of stop motion animations.
• Humans in the Archive. A Play.
• Letters to Opa: Dialogue with an ancestor. 

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— Scott Denham, Charles A. Dana Professor of German Studies, Davidson College

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From here down, you’ll find the archival materials of the four salons we held in May, 2021.

Thank you to everyone who participated in planning, translating, organizing, and preparing over the last months and thanks to all of you who have listened and watched and offered your ideas and responses during these four wonderful salons, these precious gatherings of old and new friends in these our troubled times.

See the tabs on the upper right for additional resources, recordings and transcripts of the salons, and for ways to provide responses; go there to contact us; go here to fill out a little form if you would like to be put on the occasional email list for updates about the project.

Welcome Salonists!
Have a look at these artifacts—documents, letters, photographs, postcards, and the like—from the archive. We welcome all kinds of responses. As you click on the images you will see that some link out to more information, as appropriate and if we have it, as well as to a higher resolution image.

At the salons we’ll have further suggestions about your future engagement with the project.

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note please: This page is just a provisional workspace for all of us. Nothing permanent. Accordingly we’ve not spent much time on design or format; the goal rather is to make our selections from the archive available to everyone attending any of the salons. We will take the page down after our time exploring the archive together is done, sometime this summer, after we decide what the next steps might be. Please direct any technical questions about the pages here to academic partner Scott Denham. We can discuss any questions about the artifacts during the salons.

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Dear Friends,
Thank you for replying to our invitation. Here you will find over the next six weeks or so a series of artifacts from the various family archives, a vast collection of photographs, letters, postcards, documents, diaries, and other artifacts that document in part the pathways of interconnected families from German-speaking central Europe in the eighteenth century, to all over the world today.

from the invitation

9 May Salon 1 • Gideon convenes

9 May Salon 1
Gideon leads
with contributions from  
Gareth Evans: Writer, Producer and Adjunct Moving Image Curator, Whitechapel Gallery
Sika Fakambi: Translator
Denis Hirson: Writer
Jessica Dubow: Reader in Cultural Geography, University of Sheffield
Sophie-Charlotte Opitz: Art and media theorist, director of the Walther Collection

16 May Salon 2 • Scott convenes

16 May Salon 2 – two hours with a break in the middle
Scott leads

• WELCOME

(about 10 minutes)
• an animation from Eli Mendel
• opening statements from Eli and Gideon
• images from Gideon Mendel

(about half an hour)
with contributions from
• Paul Gottlieb: family member
• Tali Nates: historian and director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre
• Molly-May Smith: educator at Show Racism the Red Card and former educator at the Anne Frank trust
• Laura Morreale: independent scholar in digital humanities; affiliate at the Medieval Academy of America, Georgetown University, Harvard University

five-minute break

(about 15 minutes)
• reflections from Daniel Lee: Historian, University of London and Denis Hirson: Writer
in conversation with Scott Denham

(fifteen minutes)
• breakout rooms for discussion

(about 5 minutes)
• reports and comments from breakout conversations go into the chat

(about 15 minutes)
• closing comments from the presenters

23 May Salon 3 • Eli convenes

23 May Salon 3 (plans tentative)
Eli leads
with contributions from
Shirli Gilbert: historian on South African Jewish history
Guy Domb: Jewish activist and student
Mikhael Subotzky: Artist, photographer and family member
Sara Banerjee: family member
Maurice Norman: Digital Projects Fellow, Stories Yet To Be Told project
Linda Brogan: playwright 

30 May Salon 4 • Julian convenes

30 May Salon 4
Julian leads

• Gideon opens with images and Eli’s animation
• Readings from the letters of Rosa, Samuel, and Alf and from the memoir of Julius
  With the Voices of:
  • Marianne Tuckman: Northern School of Contemporary Dance / Swansea University
  • Gideon Mendel
  • Nico San-Martin: Actor

contributions from

• Pat McConeghy: Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University; Translator
• Naomi Segal: Honorary Fellow, Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London
• Astrid Ley: Historian and Deputy Head of the Sachsenhausen Museum
• Rebecca Clifford: Associate Professor of Modern History, Swansea University
• Stephen Laufer: journalist, editor, and communications advisor
• Indra Wussow: literary scholar, researcher, writer and curator

• responses from the full group in the audience (please use the raise-hand button or signal to Scott privately in the chat that you would like to offer comment or question to the contributors) and responses from the contributors.
  
• Eli and Gideon close the salon.
• Denis Hirson — final words
  
  As always we are grateful for written responses in the chat and in a document we will post during the salon.
  
  As in the previous salons all people present, family members especially, are invited to remain after the session is closed for casual conversation for a half hour or so.