Erich Kuphal

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Andreas Erich Kuphal (born July 1, 1895 in Haldensleben ; † January 5, 1965 in Cologne ) was an archivist and historian .

Career

Erich Kuphal studied from 1914 despite the outbreak of the First World War history at the Universities of Halle , Munich and Leipzig . In 1920 he received his doctorate in Halle with a thesis on the knight Ludwig von Eyb the Younger . In 1921 he began his career as an archive volunteer at the Secret State Archives in Berlin and in 1923 passed the examination for the higher archive service.

In 1924 Kuphal moved to Cologne. There he was appointed director of the historical archive of the city of Cologne in 1932 after eight years as archivist .

Securing the archive material

Cologne, city archive around 1897, later a private library and from 2014 part of a hotel

As early as September 1939, immediately after the start of the Second World War , Erich Kuphal, together with his colleague Arnold Güttsches , planned to outsource the holdings of the Cologne archive as a precaution. They were brought to remote places in the Bergisch , Wildenburger and Siegerland regions , as well as to the vaults of the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress , in good time and in a decentralized manner . This led to the saving of the archive material .

Some of Germany's major cities experienced particularly intense air raids . Up until the spring of 1945, Cologne's inner city had a degree of destruction of almost 90 percent. The city's archive building at the Gereonskloster also suffered bomb damage, which, thanks to the timely relocation of the holdings, only damaged the building.

Appreciation

In his Cologne years from 1927 to 1953, Kuphal took over the editing of the yearbooks of the Cologne History Association. The publication of the Cologne History Association No. 25 honored city archivist Erich Kuphal on July 1, 1960 with a commemorative publication under the motto "In the shadow of St. Gereon " at the age of 65 . The era of National Socialism also fell during Kuphal's tenure . In the mid-1930s, the regular order and indexing work in the archive is said to have come to a standstill, and in 1935 the last volume of the “Communications from the City Archives of Cologne” appeared for a long time.

In the following years, according to critical voices, the archive management is said to have shown itself to be very compliant to the wishes of politics. The archivists are said to have been all too willing to put themselves in the service of clan and family research, so that the traditional field of archival work was primarily concerned with genealogical research in order to obtain information about their families for the purpose of Aryan records for the steadily increasing flow of inquirers .

On the other hand, his greatest achievement is the safeguarding of the archives during the last world war. Another achievement of Kuphal was, in collaboration with Hermann Pünder , the Lord Mayor of Cologne, that important holdings that had come to external archives were returned to Cologne. It was the Stadtkölnischen holdings of the entire monastery and monastery archives that were in the main state archive in Düsseldorf and, after tough negotiations, could be returned to Cologne in 1949.

Erich Kuphal worked for the city archive until 1960 and retired after reaching the age of 65. He did not live to see the move into the new archive building on Severinstrasse in Cologne in 1971.

Kuphal was married to Herta Franziska Wilhelmine Niewel since 1938. He died at the age of 69 in his apartment in Cologne-Neuehrenfeld .

Fonts (selection)

as an author
  • Writing and filing of the city administration in the late Middle Ages. Cologne - Nuremberg - Lübeck. Contribution to comparative urban research and late medieval records (communications from the Cologne city archive; issue 45). Published by Paul Neubner, Cologne 1959.
  • Ludwig von Eyb the Younger. (1450-151) . In: Archive for History and Archeology of Upper Franconia , Vol. 30 (1927), Issue 1, pp. 6–51, ISSN  0066-6335 (plus dissertation, University of Halle).
as editor
  • The Cologne Cathedral. Festschrift to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its completion on October 15, 1880 . Cologne History Society 1930.

literature

  • Hans Reykers: In the shadow of St. Gereon . Erich Kuphal on July 1, 1960 (publications by the Cologne History Association; vol. 25). Verlag der Löwe, Cologne 1960 (with bibliography).
  • Ulrich Soénius , Jürgen Wilhelm: Kölner Personen-Lexikon . Greven Verlag, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-7743-0400-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ulrich Soénius , Jürgen Wilhelm: Kölner Personen-Lexikon , p. 311.
  2. ↑ a b Death certificate no. 20 from January 6, 1965, registry office Cologne Ehrenfeld. In: LAV NRW R civil status register. Retrieved June 20, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Erich Kuphal: Ludwig von Eyb the Younger (1450-1521) . Dissertation, University of Halle 1920.
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Leesch : The German archivists 1500-1945. Volume 2: Biographical Lexicon. Saur, Munich a. a. 1992, ISBN 3-598-10605-X , sv Kuphal.
  5. ↑ Guardian of Treasures and Digital Service Provider - 150 Years of the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne. Exhibition catalog Cologne 2007, p. 60
  6. ^ Klaus Wisotzky: [1]
personal data
SURNAME Kuphal, Erich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kuphal, Andreas Erich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian and archivist
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Haldensleben
DATE OF DEATH January 5, 1965
Place of death Cologne