State Archives Bremen

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The Bremen State Archives
(seen from President-Kennedy-Platz )

The Bremen State Archive ( StAB for short , full name State Archive of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen ), as a state archive, preserves and makes accessible the archival-worthy documents of the State of Bremen and the City of Bremen . The history of its predecessor facilities goes back to the Middle Ages . It is one of the oldest institutions in Bremen.

History of the State Archives

The beginnings

The Liebfrauenkirche to the left behind the town hall on the map of Braun and Hogenberg from 1598

The origins of the Bremen State Archives are in the 13th century (first mentioned in a chronicle for the year 1221) or in the 12th century (oldest preserved privilege issued for the city from 1159, the Bürgerweide letter  ). In contrast to the archbishopric administration, the first city custody of documents was formed parallel to the emergence of the city's bourgeois self-government, to which the first imperial rights were granted with the issue of the Barbarossa Diploma in 1186. The accumulating city documents , contracts, privileges and title were kept in the Tresekammer (from Latin thesaurus , German 'treasure') in the north tower of the Liebfrauenkirche , together with valuables and funds from the city. Only councilors had access to the bar , the keys were kept by the two oldest mayors . The Bremen document archive remained in the Tresekammer until 1909.

From the 15th century, in particular, an extensive system of files and official records was created with documents from the council chancellery, the town clerk and the judicial registry of the Bremen council , which were kept in the Rhederkammer and the Wittheitsstube in the town hall and in other municipal buildings such as the Akzisehaus . Not infrequently, however, important documents were also kept at home by the members of the council. This confusing situation meant that a commission had to be set up regularly to find lost state files. In 1685, 38 bundles were secured from the private estate of Rats- Syndicus Johann Wachmann , and 13 bundles from that of Mayor Georg Gröning in 1828. 

Beginning of the archive

Hermann Post, from 1727 first full-time archivist in Bremen

The council has been archiving its documents in the bar in the north tower of the Liebfrauenkirche since the 13th century . The files were in the town hall; since 1731 partly in the Güldenkammer. The files have been stored in the town hall since 1826 .

Mayor Diedrich Hoyer the Elder introduced the first registration of documents and files in the 16th century. A fundamental reorganization of the archives system did not begin until 1727 with the appointment of Hermann Post as the city's first professional archivist. He expanded Hoyer's register, bundled the documents in the town hall and separated the government and administrative files from the briefs of the judicial registries. In 1742 he also carried out a classification and mapping of the Trese . Post's well thought-out and expandable system of order was essentially preserved well into the 19th century.

However, the "filing" - that is, the transfer of the files to the archive for archiving purposes - was still problematic. It happened again and again that documents were lost after the death of councilors or mayors. The archivist and later mayor Liborius Diederich Post reported that "[...] many a fascicle concerning the local state of affairs fell into private hands, was given to shopkeepers and hackers or was lost in family records until they were once again received from a friend of patriotic news were collected. "   in this sense, archivist Heinrich Gerhard post early 19th century saved the entire original correspondence of Bremen's embassy in Vienna from the time of the Thirty Years' war (Grade Bremen independence, defense of Elsflether inch ) from the hands of a shopkeeper, who documents the used as packaging material for silk. 

The town house, built on Domshof in 1818

This situation improved in 1832 under archivist Heinrich Smidt (a son of Mayor Johann Smidt ) and his successors. This development was promoted by the move of the archive in 1826 from the town hall to a storage room in the town house on the Domshof, which was newly built after the end of the Napoleonic occupation of Bremen . Nonetheless, the archive remained overloaded with filing, filing and mapping work, even at the new location, so that a historical and scientific processing of the holdings was hardly possible. The so-called “special stocks”, such as the Hanoverian or French files that had passed into the possession of Bremen, posed a further problem. The system initiated by Post was ultimately no longer up to the volume and variety of these various documents. It was not until 1875, under Wilhelm von Bippen  - the first specialist historian in the office of archivist - that the scientific processing of the holdings began in the true sense, as well as a reorganization of the filing system with a separation into registry (Senate registry ) and archive (Council archive ). Von Bippen also continued the series of publications of the Bremen document books that Diedrich Ehmck had started and completed five volumes of the work.

Relocation (1909) and free access, war losses

The Bremen State Archives on the Tiefer in 1910

On the occasion of the demolition of the town hall and the construction of the New Town Hall , the State Archives moved in 1909 to a building newly built by Albin Zill on the Tiefer - there all holdings, including the bar, were combined for the first time and set up in such a way that they could be used on a larger scale has been. In the period between the world wars, archive manager Hermann Entholt made the transition from the pertinence principle to the provenance principle , that is, the summary of the written material according to its origin instead of its facts .

During the time of National Socialism , with the loss of the independence of the State of Bremen, the State Archives became a municipal institution called the Archives of the Hanseatic City of Bremen  - in the archive itself, however, there were no significant changes compared to the time of the Weimar Republic . During the Second World War , a large part of the archive was relocated, initially to Königsberg in 1941 and to mines near Helmstedt and Bernburg an der Saale in 1942 . When the building on the Tiefer was destroyed in a bomb attack on February 24, 1945, there was no significant loss of files. Major losses only occurred after the end of the war, when the holdings in the Grasleben mine near Helmstedt were looted and the documents stored in Bernburg were completely confiscated by Soviet troops. The latter were brought to Leningrad and then to Moscow in 1946 - they comprised 380 boxes of archive material from Bremen and a further 1000 boxes from Lübeck and Hamburg . As a result of the war, around a third of the documents and manuscripts were lost, including the oldest documents in the archive, such as the founding document of the Paulskloster from 1139. 

Provisional (until 1968), new building, return of extensive holdings

After the war, the State Archives from 1945 to 1968 was temporarily in the Villa Rutenberg (today local exchange center / Eastern suburbs) Am Dobben and in an adjacent bunker housed. In 1957, all documents were reorganized into 16 inventory groups, and in 1958 archiving was regulated by law in the file system for the authorities of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen and the city of Bremen .

In May 1968 the State Archives moved into a new building designed by Alfred Meister on President-Kennedy-Platz (address Am Staatsarchiv 1 ) in the immediate vicinity of the American Consulate General . The building, which today still houses the State Archives, consists of a magazine tower with eight floors and two basements with an archive capacity for 10 kilometers of files and an attached two-story atrium building for administration, workshops, using (library, reading room) and public events (lectures ). The building has been a listed building since 2008 . The storage capacity has been largely exhausted since the beginning of the 1990s, which is why the State Archives have been using the high bunker Am Dobben as an external storage facility since 1994 , in which mainly rarely used large stocks are kept. A new store building behind the main building at the State Archives is being planned.

The Linz diploma

In the last few decades, the State Archives opened up new collection areas and media, such as posters , leaflets , image, film and sound carriers. In addition, the collection of the Gesellschaft für Familienforschung Die Maus was added. Since 1975 the State Archives have been subordinate to the Senator for Art (formerly Senator for Science and Art, currently Senator for Culture). Some of the lost holdings returned to Bremen in several steps: in 1952 189 boxes were sent from Moscow, initially to the German Central Archives of the GDR in Potsdam, and then back to the Hanseatic city in 1987. In the 1990s, further archival holdings from Russia and Armenia were returned, including the valuable Linz diploma in 1998 , with which Bremen was granted imperial status. Even if over 90% of the holdings have returned, archival material is currently still missing, including the Barbarossa diploma, state treaties, church documents and all of the former holdings of card, coin and medal collections. 

The archive is responsible for the historical documentation center for the Ostertorwache prison , which was set up as a detention center in 1828.

Head of the State Archives

Listed chronologically from the first professional archivist to the present:

The State Archives today

As a documentation and information center, the Bremen State Archives keep and make accessible documents of the state and the city of Bremen that are worth archiving on the basis of the Bremen Archives Act. It is not responsible for the municipal records of the city of Bremerhaven , which maintains its own city archive. 

The State Archive has around 20 employees and its holdings include over 11,000  meters of shelving . For the purpose of completion, the inventory of historical documents is continuously expanded through takeovers and acquisitions (annual growth on average over 100 meters of shelf space). Special magazines and a restoration and bookbinding workshop are available for the maintenance of the archive material. To communicate the research results, the State Archives publishes various series of documents (see below), organizes exhibitions and lectures, and enables the public to research the holdings and use the affiliated library with a focus on regional history. Like the library, the archive holdings are increasingly being made accessible for use with special software. The inventory overview of the State Archives has been available online since 2000, and the first large picture holdings of the State Archives can also be consulted online.

The offices and work rooms of two associations, the Historical Society Bremen eV and the MAUS - Society for Family Research Bremen eV are located in the State Archives

Extensive renovation work was carried out on the building by 2010.

Holdings of the State Archives

The holdings of the State Archives are divided into 16 holdings groups: 

  1. Certificate Fund
  2. Council Archives
  3. Senate registry
  4. Authorities, offices and courts of the state and the municipality of Bremen
  5. Reich and federal authorities based in the area of ​​the State of Bremen
  6. Other authorities resident in the area of ​​the State of Bremen, public institutions and corporations, as well as deliveries from foreign authorities and courts relating to Bremen
  7. Documents of non-governmental origin
  8. Family history collection
  9. Contemporary history collection
  10. Image archive , film and sound carrier collection
  11. Card collection
  12. Collection of coats of arms and seals
  13. Collection of coins, plaques, medals and orders
  14. Scientific library
  15. Archival aids
  16. Microfilms / archival material from external archives (reproductions)

Publications of the State Archives

The State Archives self-publish the following series of publications:

  • Bremisches Jahrbuch (Brem. Jb.) : This oldest journal in Bremen has been published since 1863 and is published in cooperation with the Bremen Historical Society . It contains works on all topics and epochs of Bremen's history. The following web links lead to the individual yearbooks:
  • Publications from the State Archives of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (VStAB) : This series, which has been published since 1928, publishes more extensive monographic works on topics from the history of Bremen. Volume 69 of this series was published in 2009.
  • Small writings : This third series contains smaller writings on exhibitions, studies and project work.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bremen State Archives. Retrieved October 10, 2009 .
  2. ^ The State Archive Bremen 1968. Authority - Documents - History . In: Karl H. Schwebel (Ed.): Publications from the State Archives of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen . tape  36 . Schünemann Verlag, Bremen 1968, p. 13 .
  3. ^ The State Archive Bremen 1968. Authority - Documents - History . In: Karl H. Schwebel (Ed.): Publications from the State Archives of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen . tape  36 . Schünemann Verlag, Bremen 1968, p. 16 .
  4. ^ Karl H. Schwebel: Hermann Post, a collector and folder of valuable old documents - 250 years of scientific archive service in Bremen . In: Bremisches Jahrbuch . tape 55 . Bremen 1977, p. 81 .
  5. ^ Karl H. Schwebel (Ed.): The State Archive Bremen 1968. Authority - Documents - History . In: Publications from the State Archives of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen . Volume 36, Schünemann Verlag, p. 16 f
  6. ^ The State Archive Bremen 1968. Authority - Documents - History . In: Karl H. Schwebel (Ed.): Publications from the State Archives of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen . tape  36 . Schünemann Verlag, Bremen 1968, p. 28 .
  7. ^ The State Archive Bremen 1968. Authority - Documents - History . In: Karl H. Schwebel (Ed.): Publications from the State Archives of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen . tape  36 . Schünemann Verlag, Bremen 1968, p. 74 .
  8. ^ Monument database of the LfD
  9. ^ According to direct information from the State Archives, October 2009.
  10. ↑ Bremen Archives Act. Transparency portal of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, accessed on April 16, 2016 .
  11. ^ The State Archive Bremen 1968. Authority - Documents - History . In: Karl H. Schwebel (Ed.): Publications from the State Archives of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen . tape  36 . Schünemann Verlag, Bremen 1968, p. 20-21 .

literature

  • Karl H. Schwebel (Hrsg.): The State Archive Bremen 1968. Authority - Documents - History . In: Publications from the State Archives of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen . Volume 36, Schünemann Verlag, Bremen 1968.
  • Wilhelm Lührs (Ed.) / Klaus Schwarz: Overview of the holdings of the State Archives of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen . In: Publications from the State Archives of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen . Volume 48, self-published by the State Archives of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, Bremen 1982.
  • Archives: Archives in German-speaking countries . Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 1974, ISBN 978-3-11-001955-1 , p. 142.
  • Hartmut Müller : "... for safekeeping" - Bremen archive protection measures in the Second World War and their consequences . In: Bremisches Jahrbuch . Volume 66, Bremen 1988, pp. 409-422.
  • Konrad Elmshäuser : The separation of the Bremen State Archives from the Senate Chancellery and the New Town Hall by the Munich architect Gabriel von Seidl . In: Archival Journal . Volume 88, FS Hermann Rumschöttel, 2006, pp. 121-142.
  • Herbert Black Forest : The Great Bremen Lexicon . 2nd, updated, revised and expanded edition. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X .
  • State Archive Bremen (Ed.): Archives in the state of Bremen. Small writings of the Bremen State Archives, volume 44, Bremen 2009.

Web links

Commons : State Archive Bremen  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 53 ° 4 ′ 37.3 "  N , 8 ° 48 ′ 58"  E