Archimob
Archimob (. From the French "Archives de la mobilization") is the largest oral history - project of Switzerland . It arose in the context of the Swiss debate about dormant Jewish accounts and the country's foreign trade with the fascist states during World War II, which was of great public relevance at the end of the 1990s. The so-called Bergier Commission (UEK), convened by parliament , has been investigating the country's handling of the situation from 1939–1945 since 1996 using traditional historical instruments . Against this background, Archimob can be understood as a supplementary perspective that uses the memories of contemporary witnesses as a source and not the classic archive documents.
Archimob was founded in 1998 by filmmaker Frédéric Gonseth . Over forty historians and filmmakers from Switzerland belong to the association. Its aim is to collect and archive testimonies about the time of the Second World War in Switzerland. From 1999 to 2001 the association conducted 555 interviews with contemporary witnesses. Information on contemporary witnesses and excerpts from the interviews are available online via a database.
The project resulted in a traveling exhibition entitled “L'Histoire c'est moi” and 22 documentaries that were shown in the exhibition and in cinemas. This also includes a reader (“ Landigeist und Judenstempel ”), which is still used today as an oral history source collection in an academic setting.
literature
- Christof Dejung, Thomas Gull, Tanja Wirz: Landigeist and Jewish stamp: memories of a generation 1930–1945. Limmat Verlag , Zurich 1990, ISBN 3-85791-414-9 .
- L'Histoire c'est moi. 555 versions of Swiss history 1939–1945: the Archimob exhibition on 4 DVD. Archimob, Lausanne 2005.