As a curator of modern works on paper, I am used to encountering objects in a state of decay and dissolution. Scholars, curators, and conservators who work with late 19th and early 20th century material know that “modern,” when used to qualify paper, often indicates a support that is fragile, friable, and crumbling. Wood pulp papers, first introduced in the mid-19th century, are the worst offenders. Rag papers, which were the most commonly used papers in Europe and America through the early 19th century, hold up well over time; a five-hundred-year-old piece of rag paper can appear surprisingly fresh and can withstand conservation treatments to correct stains or smooth out wrinkles. A piece of wood pulp paper, in contrast, will always look its age, even when it has “had work done” by a conservator. The acids in the lignin of the pulp fibers eat away at the paper, turning it brown and brittle.

I wonder how our encounter with paper in this state, manifesting time as it does in such a deeply material way, affects our relationship to the text or image printed on it. Does it make us more acutely aware of the distance between then and now as one that is unbridgeable? Does it make it more difficult to see the past as part of our present? Some of the material I work with is what is broadly identified as “ephemera,” a category that includes printed paper with a specific but a necessarily temporary function. Such objects include things like newspapers, postcards, advertisements, and packaging. Ephemerality is built into such objects, it is a state that is both ontological and material, its subject and substance. Ephemera commemorates events long past and promotes products long forgotten, and the paper on which it is printed is likewise perishable. Indeed, as if to remind us of its transience, this paper is often literally falling apart. It is as if the object has its own built-in self-destruct button. Ephemera taunts the curator and the archivist, it reminds us that the archive can at best slow time, not arrest it.

Because of this precarious material and metaphysical status of ephemera, I was very curious about some unexpected materials I encountered during research in Special Collections at USC’s Doheny Library. I was looking through items that were part of the Jacobsohn Collection on Germany Between the Wars. Dr. Leo Jacobsohn was a doctor in Berlin during World War I through the 1930s, when the Jewish Jacobsohn finally fled Nazi Germany for the United States. But during his years in Germany, Dr. Jacobsohn seems to have had a wonderfully broad attitude toward collecting. He gathered broadsides, newspapers, posters, and postcards, but also buttons, wallpaper samples, and pieces of imitation leather. Jacobsohn’s collection of World War I ephemera, for instance, includes cigarette cards, newspapers, ration cards, propagandistic phrase books, broadsides, and little paper board games that the soldier could fold up and fit into his knapsack. But Jacobsohn’s collecting wasn’t indiscriminate; what he collected always points to the larger social, cultural, political, and economic challenges he would have experienced as a German citizen during these years. This included wartime privation and rationing, political revolution and violence, the economic chaos of inflation and the rise of National Socialism.

The material that attracted my attention–indeed, the reason I was sifting through Dr. Jacobsohn’s eclectic collection in the first place–was the variety of Ersatz goods it contained. During World War I, Germany was cut off by a British blockade from international markets and the raw materials it needed to manufacture basic goods. German businesses, therefore, had to fabricate substitute or imitation materials to replace many absent necessities. One of the most common and all-purpose Ersatz materials was paper, which was formed into many new and different useful things. It was, for example, a substitute for textiles and leather and was therefore made into clothes, shoes (both uppers and soles), rope, and rugs. Jacobsohn’s collection contained a few of these items, including some shoelaces and ropes made out of paper, as well as the imitation leather and wallpaper samples mentioned above.

But the most fascinating group of Ersatz objects in Dr. Jacobsohn’s collection were the packets of imitation foods and flavoring. Dr. Jacobsohn had collected a number of these and kept them intact in their original paper packaging, which resembles the bags used for single servings of sugar or tea. Such products were clearly intended to spice up the limited and meager fare available to German families during the war. The collection includes packets of almond flavoring, imitation cinnamon, artificial sweetener (Süßstoff), something labeled “Safto pudding flavor [with an] almond taste” (Safto Pudding-Aroma Mandel Geschmack), imitation pepper, and packets of lemon and vanilla flavoring. There is a meatless meatball powder preparation, eggless egg powder (“nicht aus Eier hergestellt!” the packet announces), and something called Eureka Butter Stretcher, which promises to “stretch” a quarter pound of butter into half a pound. Although these packets are mostly intact, time and the occasional encounter with archivists and researchers has had an effect; small tears and holes have developed in these envelopes, allowing bits of the powdered preparations to spill out. Each is kept in a plastic bag to contain any continued spillage, though one cannot help but imagine what would happen if any of those baggies were to burst open by accident. These Ersatz powders, the definition of shelf stability, will nevertheless outlast their more perishable paper packaging, which were never meant to endure time or touch for long.

Erin Sullivan Maynes, LACMA