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New York. In collaboration with the Leo Baeck Institute, accessioning and digitizing the Artur and Lucy Strauss archive will begin this spring in New York. Strauss, a physician and cousin of Else-Lasker Schüler, was a member of the Jung Wuppertal group of poets and a naturally gifted artist. Although he made the practical decision to study medicine rather than art as a young man, the muses never abandoned him. As members of the assimilated Jewish middle class, he and his wife (née Hertz) were avid collectors and patrons of the arts in Barmen — once a vibrant modernist center and today a part of Wuppertal. Unable to obtain immigrant visas and join their son Arnold, also a physician, who had emigrated to the USA two weeks after the photograph below was taken, Artur and Lucy committed suicide in The Hague in September of 1940. This voluminous and historically important collection, which consists largely of correspondence from 1919 to 1948, represents an inexhaustible source of political, cultural and psychological commentary from the Weimar Republic through the Nazi Era. Once digitizing has been completed, materials written in Kurrentschrift and Antiqua from the years 1933, 1935 and 1938 will be used to train models for an AI-supported pilot project with Transkribus.