Klaus Sator has made sure that the estate of the anarchist and artist John Olday comes to the Schwules Museum. And no sooner has he started cataloging it than a second, comparably confusing bequest arrives. In collaboration with employees in the museum archive, Klaus tries to organize the items so that others can find them again later – and in doing so, he may come across musical instruments, flight bookings and cooking recipes. In this interview, he explains how he goes about sorting.

Dear Klaus, over the last few weeks you’ve always been seen somewhere in the building with a big trolley and lots of boxes on it. What are you doing at the Schwules Museum right now?

I’m cataloging the estate of Volker Elis Pilgrim, which has recently been added to the Museum’s collection. Pilgrim was an important representative of the German men’s movement of the 1970s and 80s and wrote books at that time with circulation figures that we can only dream of today.

And he was also a public figure, appearing on talk shows….

…on television, that’s right.

But people hardly know him today, do they?

Not the younger ones. But anyone who is a bit interested in the history of the men’s movement and gender studies in its appendices can’t really get past him. When the request came in, I had a look around my house: I had six volumes by him from the Rowohlt series “Mann”, there was such a thing back then.

What was the idea behind the men’s movement back then? Back then, men had enough space to spread out.

It was about questioning oneself and one’s origins. Some men were very committed to trying to find out why they had so many advantages. From a Eurocentric point of view, it has to be said, but they fought against the classic expectations, even if they didn’t feel gay. There were self-awareness groups, body explorations, seminars… and Pilgrim played a big part in that.

Exciting. And this is just one of two estates that you are currently opening up for the Schwules Museum.

Yes, the second is the estate of John Olday, a German-British man who was born out of wedlock and discovered his homosexuality in the course of his life. He was an anarchist, in other words someone who sought freedom in everything and rejected state constraints as a matter of principle. His anarchist colleagues knew relatively early on that he was gay. What I find really fascinating about him is that there is a list in his estate where, towards the end of his life, he tries to list relatively precisely which people in his life were important to him, and he does this according to categories such as “sexuality” and ‘friendship’ – and there is a whole list of men, in addition to two or three women who were also in the “sexuality” category.

So two pretty wild, cosmopolitan biographies, from different generations! How is it that the estates of such exciting people end up here at the Schwules Museum?

So Pilgrim came here because his former temporary partner and his wife heard about his death. They contacted the Schwules Museum directly to see if there was any interest and then covered the costs of bringing all these things to Germany. And they also sponsor a bit of the reappraisal, so to speak, which is what I do. In the case of Olday, I myself made sure that the estate came here, because I came across him through an exhibition we were doing at the Centrum Schwule Geschichte in Cologne on the subject of “Homosexuality in Caricature” and then realized that he was actually the first gay man to ironize gay life. That was long before Ralf König and was not so well received by gays at the time. But these caricatures were widely published. For example, he also illustrated the gay Spartacus travel guide from 1975 with over 200 small caricatures.

So he published self-deprecating material in the gay media?

Exactly. In Germany, it was “him”, where he had designed a page for a while. I had written an essay about Olday and then the “brother-in-law”, the brother of his partner who had died in London, approached me. He told me that he still had all these things that Olday and his friend had left in the attic at his house when they came back from Australia. There were eight or nine overseas crates with lots of material. And then I said, as a gay man, it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we could get it into the museum here in Berlin. He is actually hardly present among gay people anymore. Although he sang songs with gay themes relatively early on. But “gay” and “anarchist” don’t go together very well for the mainstream.

Although you described his anarchism as a kind of proto-queerness.

Yes, but that doesn’t mean that mainstream society likes it. It’s not such a problem for anarchists.

Before we get to the practical work of how to open up such extensive and diverse estates, perhaps a few words about you. You just mentioned the Centrum Schwule Geschichte in Cologne. The magazine in which you wrote about Olday was “Invertito”…

Yes, the yearbook of the professional association Homosexuality and History. It’s published once a year by Männerschwarm, and the 26th issue is now in preparation. I actually come from southern Hessen, from Darmstadt, and moved to Cologne at the end of the last century for professional reasons.

You’re a historian, aren’t you?

I actually trained as a teacher of social studies, history and community studies, but at a time when there was a glut of teachers. Then I did a doctorate in contemporary history, but didn’t get a job at all. So I did further training as a scientific documentarian, here in Potsdam with an internship at SWF, and was also involved in the Centrum Schwule Geschichte and SC Janus, the first gay and lesbian sports club…

How did you get into sport?

To make social contacts. And that was partly connected because I also initiated and curated what was probably the world’s first exhibition on lesbians and gays in sport, which was exhibited at the German Sport & Olympia Museum in Cologne in 2000, is now a traveling exhibition and was last shown in Spain in 2023. It was translated into six languages.

An international success!

If you like, but on a small scale, not as well equipped as the Schwules Museum, which of course isn’t well equipped either, but in proportion it is.

And when did you get to know it?

When I came to Berlin, I saw a few exhibitions at the former Mehringdamm location. And through my professional association, I also knew people who used to work at the Schwules Museum, Karl-Heinz Steinle and Jens Dobler, who recently passed away. And then, of course, there was the successful “Homosexualität_en” exhibition, in collaboration with the German Historical Museum.

How have you perceived the Schwules Museum since the Mehringdamm period?

That it has become more and more professionalized. The exhibitions are relatively well attended and very professionally done. At Mehringdamm, it was more, how should I put it, not quite so professional, but very, very committed.

Anyway, you had the idea of bringing the Olday estate here. And how did the Pilgrim executors come across you?

That was actually more or less by chance. When I was down here in the café, the two people involved with the Pilgrim estate, Ulfa von der Steinen and Alexej Mend, approached me via Rüdiger Lautmann, who introduced us. They asked me if I would be interested in doing it. And then I said that, in principle, I found Pilgrim a very exciting person, but I didn’t want to open up a second estate on a voluntary basis…

How big was it? How do you quantify something like that?

In running meters! Or the number of boxes. Pilgrim had a lot of books in there, he had quite a large library, including many of his own publications, he wrote a lot, not just on queer topics. Sometimes the same book in slightly different editions, because he often revised something after receiving feedback…

Which is also exciting.

Yes! I’ve classified them into four groups: Books that have nothing to do with the topic at all. And books with a queer theme that could be interesting for the house here, if they’re not already there. Then his own works, and fourthly those he has received as gifts with a dedication. Plus the work materials. There are also books where he made marginal notes, for example a few volumes of the Marx-Engels works, because he was concerned with the patriarchal relationship between Karl Marx and the women in his family… In total, there are 123 boxes, not all of them full of course, because you have to be careful with books with back pain.

We all know that from moving house. Okay, so there are books in there, and what else?

A lot of private material, so photos from different contexts, lots and lots of correspondence. The material didn’t arrive very well sorted. I haven’t been able to categorize some of it yet. And then it’s also spread out in different boxes. But what particularly fascinates me is that Pilgrim kept an incredible amount of diaries, almost every day.

From when to when?

I can’t say exactly yet. He actually started as a schoolboy. He used to write more in his diary, but the way he writes is really amazing. All the things he experienced, who he was in contact with, who he met. Rosa von Praunheim is mentioned, for example, and he also worked with him. And there are sometimes diary entries that only concern one subject. So just now I had one in my hand that was about two years ago, when there was this RAF story in Germany and he was dealing with the developments. And nothing else. But it’s also a diary, with dates!

And does it also contain such banal everyday observations, what he had for breakfast…?

Certainly, but I haven’t looked that deeply into it now. Indexing 123 boxes is a lot of work. I try to classify only according to rough criteria, not to read everything. To do that, you would first have to get to grips with his handwriting.

You’ve already hinted at this, but how did the material arrive here?

It was repackaged first. Material can become damp during storage, in which case microbes, bacteria and all sorts of things can develop in the paper. This is a concern for conservation reasons, as you don’t want an affected stock to spread to other items. In any case, the 123 boxes were the result of repackaging by two other archive employees.

And how do you proceed in practice? Well, if I imagine you find something in box 4 and then realize that box 76 has the same connection. How do you keep all these balls in the air so that you end up finding the right assignments?

That’s the big problem at the moment, a space problem! There’s a rough inventory that gives a very brief outline of what’s in these boxes. So I go through the list and suddenly suspect that there might be something interesting in this box. But can I find it straight away? And when you look inside, the handwritten material sometimes has breaks in it. You realize it stops somewhere. The continuation may have been lost, perhaps in another box…

A really challenging task! Where does that lead, ideally?

The idea is to sort and group everything in the sense of a finding aid, ideally in a database that then indexes the material using specific terms so that it is useful for users. Pilgrim has relatively few objects that could be used for an exhibition. For example, Olday has instruments that he played on, a guitar and an accordion, and the overseas crates are of course also quite interesting…

So Pilgrim only has dry written material?

So there are a few small objects. One looks like a stone, but the listing says “sculpture”, so I have to think, what is the sculptural aspect of this thing? It probably comes from the last phase of his life, when he was involved with the ethnic minorities in Auckland (New Zealand). However, the development of the content is not the first priority, I’m first interested in the formal criteria: How can you assign what, can you “dispose” of what? Difficult question: What do you throw away? There are flight bookings, for example. Is that important? On the other hand, you can see a bit of where it has moved. Or what if you find a recipe?

For which dish?

I can’t remember. There were a few, he also wrote a book about vegetarianism, which was actually quite successful…

I see! But wouldn’t that be something for another archive?

In principle, at least as far as I know, you always try to keep the collection together. And then an archive has to consider: do I want this or not? Of course, with Olday you could say, I’ll take everything about anarchism out of there. But then where do I put the things that are a bit mixed?

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, for example, made notes for his upcoming films on the backs of scene flyers…

It’s the same with Pilgrim, there are front and back pages with completely different material!

What discoveries did you personally make during the development process?

Well, certain things from my own biography come up again. When he mentions certain books, and I think that’s also in my books, I’ve also read them. What fascinates me, of course, is the network he had. However, you also realize that there were also many breaks in these contacts. I often ask myself why he drifted off like that in the last years of his life. There are such interesting phenomena that many gays end up on an esoteric track when they get older…

Do you want to work on the content of Pilgrim at some point?

I haven’t thought about that yet. But I’m writing a biography about Olday. It’s coming out in September in the Rosa Winkel series!

Wow. One last question: what do you think you need to be able to do this kind of work?

Well, of course there are classic training courses for it, but there is also commitment and interest! I believe that people who are not archivists, who have not studied history, can also do this if they have an interest. But you should have a certain awareness of the problem and, above all, you should always see things in their time! Because what we think is right today will definitely no longer be the state of affairs in 50 years’ time. So you always have to consider different perspectives, not just the current point of view, because you never know what might be of interest to whom.

Thank you Klaus for your work and this interesting interview!

Interview: Jan Künemund, photo: Yasmin Künze.