City Archives Aachen
| City Archives Aachen
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|---|---|
 City archive in the old needle factory |
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| Archive type | Municipal Archives |
| Coordinates | 50 ° 46 '22.1 " N , 6 ° 7' 12.9" E |
| place | Aachen |
| Visitor address | Reichsweg 30, 52068 Aachen |
| founding | 16th Century |
| Age of the archive material | > 1000 years |
| ISIL | DE-A101 |
| carrier | City Aachen |
| Website | www.aachen.de |
The Aachen City Archive is the municipal archive of the city of Aachen . It has been based in the former needle factory of Rhein-Nadel Automation since 2012 . Since 1885 it was housed in the grass house and before that in the Aachen town hall. Its origins go back to the 12th century; First mentions as a document archive are from the 14th century.
The Aachen City Archive preserves the holdings on the history of the city of Aachen as well as historically valuable documents of its own and non-urban origin, as well as collections from companies, associations and institutions as well as from major extended families and private individuals in Aachen.
The oldest existing objects are a certificate from Emperor Heinrich II , dated January 21, 1018, which sealed the transfer of a tenth district for the Burtscheid Abbey , and a diploma from Emperor Friedrich I, Barbarossa of January 9, 1166 on the granting of coin, market and city law for the city of Aachen.
history
The city administration of the Free Imperial City of Aachen began collecting important documents early on and storing them in a specially created document archive by the 14th century at the latest. This archive was subordinate to the chancellery of the town clerk and, according to the mentions, was housed in the granus tower of the Aachen town hall by the 16th century at the latest . Less important documents and minutes were stored in a file archive in the administration rooms of the town hall. This distinction between the archives of documents and files led to the fact that in the course of the Aachen city fire of 1656, the files and manuscripts were completely burned with a few exceptions, but the documents in the Granus Tower were spared from the fire. Despite the bad experiences from this fire, the city administration kept the division into document and file archives until the end of the imperial city period. The files remained in a kind of old registry and from the 18th century were looked after by registrars specially hired for this purpose.
In view of the amount of archival material that had been accumulated, the content of the collection and registration began in the 17th century. There is evidence that the city secretary Heinrich Albert Ostlender (1697–1760) dealt with the reorganization of the archive and the creation of a directory of the existing holdings for the first time from 1730. The lawyer Schwarz, about whom little is otherwise known, continued this task from 1760.
In 1780, Karl Franz Meyer , an official archivist, was hired for the first time and promoted to council secretary in 1782. He undertook extensive study trips to research printed sources on the city's history, to copy them off or even to transfer them to Aachen at great expense. When the French army advanced towards Aachen in 1794 as part of the First Coalition War , Meyer arranged for the archive holdings to be brought to Münster and brought to a safe place. He himself went into exile at Werden monastery in Essen-Werden , where he died in 1795. After Aachen was occupied and declared the Arrondissement d'Aix-la-Chapelle in the Département de la Roer , the new French rulers ordered the archive holdings back to Aachen. From 1803 they were looked after by Meyer's son Carl Franz Meyer , who after the death of his father now managed the archives of documents and files in personal union. However, when he took office, he could not prevent the French national archivist Armand Gaston Camus from handing over 87 imperial and papal documents to the Paris National Library . After the end of the French occupation and the incorporation into the Kingdom of Prussia in 1815, Meyer, who had been taken over by the Prussian city administration as city archivist, was able to bring most of these documents back from Paris and store them in the premises of the town hall.
Under the direction of his successor Friedrich Ludwig Kraemer, the archives had to be relocated to the surrounding buildings again from 1840 on the occasion of a comprehensive city hall renovation and could only be transferred to the designated location by his successor Joseph Gerhard Laurent after 1865. Laurent, who also headed the Aachen City Library , which was also located in the town hall, distinguished himself during his tenure in particular by the fact that he kept the documents of the archive from the second half of the 14th century in continuation of the "codex diplomaticus aquensis" Copied by Christian Quix until the 16th century. He evaluated more than 270 documents and made them accessible again.
After the second town hall fire in 1883 , in which no archive material was significantly damaged this time, it was decided in 1889 to move the holdings to the previously completely renovated grass house. At that time Richard Pick was the archivist in charge, under whose direction a reference library was set up. This was set up in a new extension to the grass house, which also housed the Aachen city library, which had also been moved from the town hall and which in turn was now under its own management.
During the Second World War , the archive had to be brought back to safety and they survived the war years largely unscathed. After the war, Heinrich Schiffers, the acting archivist of the diocesan archives, was temporarily entrusted with the management of the city archives, since Albert Huyskens, who was retired in 1945 and was burdened with a denazification procedure, was no longer allowed to carry out the office of archives director. In 1948 Bernhard Poll took over the city archive as the new director and began to rebuild the heavily damaged archive. Since the library extension in particular suffered severe war damage, the city library was given new and separate rooms in Peterstrasse. The rescued library holdings of the city archive had to be placed back in the restored rooms of the grass house together with the retrieved archive material.
In the course of the following years, the extensive incorporation into the city of Aachen in 1972 resulted in additional large files, so that the premises in the grass house were by far no longer sufficient. As a result, from 1981 onwards, at Herbert Lepper's instigation, the archive took over suitable rooms over two floors in the baroque factory , which were supplemented in 1987 by a restoration workshop. In the following years it turned out that the conditions in the grass house no longer corresponded to the modern technical and climatic requirements of a public archive with a high number of visitors. As a result, the city of Aachen decided to acquire the vacant building of the former needle factory on Reichsweg, which it had converted into a social-educational and cultural center as part of the urban renewal of Aachen's East Quarter and, from 2013, the city archive together with its former branch office under contemporary conditions billeted.
Head of the Archives
- 1733–1760: Heinrich Albert Ostlender, lawyer and first secretary of the city of Aachen
- 1760–1780: Schwarz, lawyer and archivist
- 1780–1795: Karl Franz Meyer
- 1803–1821: Carl Franz Meyer
- 1821–1862: Friedrich Ludwig Kraemer, archivist, registrar and journalist
- 1862–1867: Joseph Gerhard Laurent , archivist and from 1844 to 1867 head of the city library
- 1867–1884: Peter Stephan Käntzeler
- 1884–1911: Richard Pick , lawyer and provincial historian
- 1911–1945: Albert Huyskens , archive director and from 1931 to 1945 head of the city library
- 1945–1948: Heinrich Schiffers, director of the Aachen diocesan archive and acting head of the city archive
- 1948–1966: Bernhard Poll
- 1966–1971: Erich Meuthen
- 1972-1997: Herbert Lepper
- 1997–2014: Thomas R. Kraus
- from December 2014: René Rohrkamp
Stocks
The holdings of the city archive include documents, files and protocols of own and non-city origin as well as plans, maps, media products and electronic data. Furthermore, own and acquired collections as well as photos and films, posters, postcards and manuscripts are stored. The archive material is divided into several departments, which in turn are arranged thematically:
- Holdings of own origin: These include documents from the time of the imperial city, the years under French administration , the subsequent Prussian era and from the period from 1946 when Aachen became part of North Rhine-Westphalia. This also includes the archive holdings acquired from the formerly independent municipalities and some municipal schools.
- Holdings from non-urban origins: They include documents about lordships , estates and farms, about monasteries and churches as well as about former authorities and institutions such as the Reich Chamber of Commerce , the jury's chair or hospital books . Furthermore, the personal legacies of some clubs, associations and guilds are included in this department, including those of the Karlsverein , the Rathausbauverein, the Aachener Geschichtsverein and the West German Society for Family Studies , as well as the bequests of well-known private individuals and the archives of large family associations and individual companies.
- The acquired collections from private collections as well as each have their own division
- the city archive's own collections, including the collections of medals and coins, the seal stamp collection , the death slip collection or the autograph collection, in particular of musicians, writers, rulers and politicians.
- The Maps and Plans section includes old cadastral maps and city maps, as well as plans for the Green Space Office and the municipal cemetery facilities.
- The archives of the newspapers published or still appearing in Aachen are summarized in a separate section, including the holdings of the imperial Reichspost , the official newspaper , the Echos der Gegenwart and the Arbeiter-Zeitung as well as the Aachener Nachrichten and the Aachener Zeitung
- The postcards, photos, films and videos as well as sound carriers include photo collections on architecture, contemporary history and works of art as well as photography and portrait collections of important personalities as well as the graphic and postcard collections of old cityscapes of Aachen and Burtscheid as well as public buildings.
- Another section includes the collection of old manuscripts, including life reports, theological collective manuscripts and chronicles from the 15th century.
Library
Reference library and
Reading room
The library of the city archive is purely a reference library or reference library, in which the holdings cannot be borrowed, but only viewed in the reading room. It consists of an extensive book inventory with currently around 24,000 volumes and 140 regional and city history magazines on city, regional and state history as well as official printed matter with 41 titles and 675 volumes. Of the total stock, which comprises around 4,300 volumes from the 16th century onwards, around 18% are to be regarded as historical, the majority of which are written in German and of which only around 300 volumes are in French, 200 in Latin, 100 in Dutch and 10 in are written in English.
Originally a so-called municipal library existed in the 17th century, which burned completely in the Aachen city fire of 1656 and was only rebuilt at the beginning of the 18th century. However, it was subordinated to the city library, which was newly set up in the town hall in 1831, and the city archive itself thereupon renounced its own library over the next few decades. It was only on the initiative of Richard Pick that the construction of a so-called reference library for the archive began, for which he received purchase funds from the regular budget and which could be continuously supplemented with gifts and donations from third parties. In 1897, after moving to the renovated grass house, it was housed spatially separated from the city library that was also relocated and was under the sole responsibility of the archive director.
After the city library was outsourced after the Second World War, Bernhard Poll set up his own scientific service library to supplement the reference library, which also received state and city history magazines and source works from the city library. Other important official printed matter from the administrative library, from individual offices and the administrative offices of the city administration were added over the years.
Several catalogs, such as the systematic indexes of the Aachen library and the historical library, as well as official, location and biographical catalogs and a special index of official printed matter as well as repertories and index cards make it easier to search through the holdings.
The library inventory is roughly analogous to the inventory structure and comprises the following areas:
- Aachen library, which covers the entire Aachen literature and consists of the subject groups on city history, festival and company publications, building history, sanctuary tour, economy, linguistic history, literature, personal biographies, dissertations on the history of Aachen and the Aachen region, as well as series and magazines.
- historical library, which mainly contains the holdings on historical auxiliary sciences , archives and their history, general as well as territorial and regional source works such as document books, regesta works. In addition, this library includes works on general political history, the national and urban history of Germany, the Rhineland, Belgium and the Netherlands, legal, constitutional and administrative history, economic and transport history, church history, art, architecture and building history, Cultural history as well as linguistics and naming, commemorative publications, biographies and family history
- historical magazine inventory, in which mainly magazines on general and political history as well as magazines and yearbooks from history and antiquity associations from the entire German Reich are integrated. There are also editions of the Rheinische Geschichtsblätter and the Rheinische Geschichts- und Altertumsvereine as well as exclusively French-language historical journals from Belgium and Luxembourg.
- historical writings, which include the history of the coronations of kings and emperors as well as the biographies of the German kings with a total of 151 volumes, and are supplemented with two incunabula and important prints from the early 16th century and 114 volumes from the 17th to 19th centuries .
- Depositum Reichskammergericht, in which more than 1,600 volumes contain legal statements, reports, counter-reports and judgments from 1509 onwards.
- Council edicts of the imperial city period from 1656 to 1798 with several thousand volumes.
- Special collection of rare official printed matter, which contains 674 volumes of ordinances, collections of resolutions and codes of law from the time of the French occupation and official and administrative gazettes from the area of the former Roer departments and the administrative district of Aachen. Furthermore, this includes, among other things, codes of law and collections of laws as well as administrative and ministerial journals of Prussia.
- Business stationery that contains printed material from the registries of the city administration from the 19th century, including several thousand volumes of files from the mayor's office and 1239 volumes of invoice receipts from the city treasury, which are an important source for printed letterheads from Aachen and foreign companies as well as commercial and craft enterprises.
- City theater with music and theater management, in which several hundred copies of theater bills and programs from the beginnings of theater in Aachen to the present are stored.
- Private library of the former city administrator Wilhelm Benker from 1968, which comprises 1264 book and 42 magazine titles, of which 432 volumes of various types specifically National Socialist literature.
Publications of the city archive (selection)
- Walter Kaemmerer: Aachen source texts . Mayer'schen Buchhandlung publishing house, Aachen 1980
- Felix Monheim: Johann Peter Joseph Monheim 1786–1855 . Mayer'schen Buchhandlung publishing house, Aachen 1981
- Norbert Kühn: The imperial abbey Kornelimünster in the Middle Ages . Mayer'schen Buchhandlung publishing house, Aachen 1982
- Thomas Wurzel: The Burtscheid Imperial Abbey from its foundation to the early modern period . Verlag der Mayer'schen Buchhandlung, Aachen 1984
- Thomas R. Kraus: Jülich, Aachen and the Reich . Verlag der Mayer'schen Buchhandlung, Aachen 1987
- Michael Niessen: The Aachener Friedensgerichte in French and Prussian times . Verlag der Mayer'schen Buchhandlung, Aachen 1991
- Herbert Lepper: From Emancipation to the Holocaust. The Israelite Synagogue Community of Aachen 1801–1942 . Verlag der Mayer'schen Buchhandlung, Aachen 1994
- Angelika Pauels (arrangement): Under eagles and swans. The chronicle of the mayor's office in Burtscheid for the years 1814–1886 . Einhard-Verlag, Aachen 1997
- Thomas R. Kraus: "Europe sees the day shine". The Aachen Peace of 1748 . Schmidt, Neustadt an der Aisch, 1998
- Marc Engels (arr.): Forced labor in the city of Aachen. Foreign deployment in a West German border town during the Second World War . Verlag der Mayer'schen Buchhandlung, Aachen 2002. ISBN 3-87519-200-1
- Walter Kaemmerer, Bernhard Poll, Hans Siemons (arr.): History of Aachen in data . Part I: until 1964, Part II: 1965–2000. Verlag der Mayer'schen Buchhandlung, Aachen 2003
- Thomas R. Kraus (Ed.): Aachen from the beginnings to the present . Vol. 1: The natural foundations. From prehistory to the Carolingians . Verlag der Mayer'schen Buchhandlung, Aachen 2011. ISBN 978-3-875-19251-3
- Thomas R. Kraus (Ed.): Aachen from the beginnings to the present . Vol. 2: Karolinger, Ottonen, Salier 765–1137 . Verlag der Mayer'schen Buchhandlung, Aachen 2013. ISBN 978-3-412-50815-9
- Thomas R. Kraus (Ed.): Aachen. From the beginning to the present . Volume 3/1: Urban Development and Events. 1138 to 1500 . Verlag der Mayer'schen Buchhandlung, Aachen 2014. ISBN 978-3-87519-257-5
- Thomas R. Kraus (Ed.): Aachen. From the beginning to the present . Volume 3/2: Areas of Life. 1138 to 1500 . Verlag der Mayer'schen Buchhandlung, Aachen 2015. ISBN 978-3-87519-259-9
- Thomas R. Kraus and Frank Pohle (eds.): Aachen from the beginnings to the present , Volume 5: From the imperial city to the “bonne ville”: Aachen at the time of the French Republic and under Emperor Napoleon I (1792–1814) . Schmidt, Neustadt ad Aisch 2018. ISBN 978-3877071441
- Monika Gussone: The oldest document in the Aachen city archive. Heinrich II donated new lands to the monastery in Burtscheid (January 21, 1018) . Aachen 2018 [From the sources of the city archive, vol. 1] ISBN 978-3-00-058650-7
- Thomas Müller and René Rohrkamp: The end of the war in Aachen in 1918 , Aachen 2018 [From the sources of the city archive, Vol. 2] ISBN 978-3-00-060129-3
literature
- Richard Pick: The Aachen City Archives . in: Festschrift for the 72nd Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Doctors , Aachen 1900, pp. 214–225
- Walter Kaemmerer: The Aachen city archive in the time of the imperial city . in: Zeitschrift des Aachener Geschichtsverein , Vol. 57 (1936), pp. 18–31
- Herbert Lepper: The Aachen City Archive and its archivists 1821–1945 . in: Zeitschrift des Aachener Geschichtsverein , Vol. 84/85 (1978), pp. 579–680
- Herbert Lepper: The City Archives Aachen . in: Der Archivar , 44 (1991), Sp. 397-403
- Paul Wentzcke and Gerhardt Lüdtke: Archives in German-speaking countries . Volume 1, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2013, pp. 3–4 ( digitalized )
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Certificate of Heinrich II. , Archives of the Month January 2018 of the City Archives Aachen
- ^ Joseph Laurent : The newly established archive and library building of the city of Aachen . In: Zeitschrift des Aachener Geschichtsverein , Vol. 19 (1897) Issue 1, pp. 1–20, ( digitalized )
- ↑ Holdings of the Aachen City Archives on the pages of archive.nrw.de
- ^ Library of the city archive , in: Bernhard Fabian (Ed.). Handbook of historical book collections in Germany . Digitized by Günter Kükenshöner. Hildesheim: Olms New Media 2003.