Freiburg City Archives

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City archive Freiburg im Breisgau

Entrance to the City Archives Freiburg / Br.
Entrance to the City Archives Freiburg / Br.
Archive type Municipal Archives
Coordinates 47 ° 59 '39.6 "  N , 7 ° 51' 3.2"  E Coordinates: 47 ° 59 '39.6 "  N , 7 ° 51' 3.2"  E
place Freiburg in Breisgau
Visitor address Grünwälderstrasse 15
founding 1855
ISIL DE-Frei101
carrier City of Freiburg im Breisgau
Website https://www.freiburg.de/pb/,Lde/235788.html

The Freiburg city archive is the archive of the city of Freiburg im Breisgau . His archival collection area is documents and certificates on the history of Freiburg as well as the files of the city and city administration of Freiburg.

history

According to the former city archivist Adolf Poinsignon , the city documents were originally kept in a chest as a moving archive in the apartment of the mayor and later of the mayor . Even decades after 1303, the year a Freiburg town hall was first mentioned , more valuable documents are said to have been kept in this way. Poinsignon suspects that this particularly affected the documents about the alliances that the city had negotiated with other cities and nobles against the Counts of Freiburg . Other important documents, including the constitution by Konrad von Zähringen (1120) as well as all other documents from the time of the Zähringer and the Rhenish City Association , had already been lost by then.

Soon after the count's rule over Freiburg came to an end and the annexation to Upper Austria in 1368, there was an organized chancellery in the town hall with a permanent location for documents. Poinsignon takes this from the city's council books, which have been continuously preserved since 1386, as well as the books of offices or council appointments from 1378. From the time before, however, only council book fragments from 1326 to 1330 have survived. The mayor's office was located in the court arbor on Münsterplatz , where it formed the basis for the court archive. The judgment books, production records, land and pawn books belonging here go back in uninterrupted order to the year 1440. The third chancellery, also mentioned in 1378, was the office of the municipal financial administration in the department store, which was later to be replaced by the current building . The department store clerk and his journeymen managed chests with cash, numerous bonds , valid and life annuity letters , interest sledding etc. These formed the basis for the later department store archive, which was stored in two special vaults.

According to Poinsignon, the historically most important of these three independent public chancelleries with an attached registry was that of the Council Court. The town clerk responsible for this had to have legal knowledge and usually had a doctorate or master's degree. He was more of a chancellor than a clerk.

With the size of the archive, the desire grew to protect at least the more valuable documents from fire and theft better than would have been possible in the Council Chancellery. The city decided to locate it in the south of the two rooster towers of the Freiburg Minster , which is documented for 1414. The part of the minster that was not owned by the city had previously belonged to the counts, at whose time no city documents had probably been stored there. Poinsignon regards this spatial separation from ongoing filing operations as the beginning of archival activity in the modern sense, even if this Münster archive has not been designated as such for centuries. For example, the following were selected for its inventory:

  • imperial and ducal letters of grace
  • various constitutional documents
  • Alliance letters with cities and lords
  • Atonement treaties with the counts
  • Transfer agreements with the House of Austria
  • Original feuds of the nobility, whose castles in the vicinity had broken by the citizenry
  • Cops and episcopal edicts
  • Letters from foreign princes

Copies of these documents were put together in diplomataries for use in the Council Chancellery , the oldest of which, the “Rothe Büchlein”, was created at the end of the 13th century. The files and documents required for day-to-day business were also still stored there, such as B. older council decisions in public affairs, guild, customs, construction, tax and tithe matters, contracts, etc. These documents were kept in the drawers of a "kensterlin" (closet) in the large office and in another box who initially stood by the stove in the office. In addition to the council minutes, there were the extensive missive books from 1440 ; In addition to the “Rothen Büchlein”, this included three other diplomataries in bulky tomes with the designations A, B and C, a coin book beginning with the year 1425, the citizen books from 1397, the collection of proverbs, the judges books, the oath books, and the "history book of the city". In it the town clerk entered the trade of the nobility, the monasteries and all other adversaries of the town. All those volumes that weren't in the two cupboards were in stacked chests. Open bookcases were not yet used in the Ratshof in Freiburg during the 15th century.

Court arbor with archive extension (left)
Old archive in the court arbor

In 1551 the city council decided to erect a building at the west end of the council courtyard with a large council chamber, in the basement of which the court arbor was moved from Münsterplatz. In order to relieve the council chancellery, a council court archive was planned as a western extension. These were two cross vaults, one above the other, of which the lower one was directly connected to the courtroom and torture chamber. The upper one is connected to the large council chamber, but can be locked by iron doors. A comparable construction was found in Leipzig City Hall at the end of the 19th century . The upper floor of the building, which was completed in 1553, has retained its original purpose to this day, while the court arbor and the associated court archive were repurposed and used as a coach house in the 19th century . The upper vault formed the core of the city archive around 1885. The four walls are provided with 278 different large drawers from floor to ceiling, the oldest of which, according to the inscription, date from 1553.

The repertories of the city archives were renewed several times, for example in 1560, 1602, 1606 and 1627. Another renewal took place after the end of the Thirty Years War by the town clerk Johann Schmidt. At that time, according to a report from July 24, 1652, individual shops were found completely empty, while others had the wrong contents. A makeshift order was restored by 1660, with Poinsignon describing the alphabetical repertory that was set up at that time as very superficial and difficult to understand. Several wars followed, two sieges, the twenty-year rule of the French and the return to the House of Austria (see History of the City of Freiburg im Breisgau ). In 1743, during a visit by the city council, complaints were made about “the archive and the registry were completely disordered and confused to everyone's great amazement and displeasure”. The then registrar Klump was ordered to reorganize the archive as quickly as possible under threat of dismissal. This was followed by the term of office of the registrar from Upper Austria, Leonard Leopold Maldoner . Taking into account the older inventories and repositories , but using a new signature , he introduced a real reorganization into 227 rubrics, of which, however, he only repertorated 70 numbers. For rubric I up to and including LX and on XCVIII up to CVII he wrote a detailed regesta collection in four volumes up to 1748 , each rubric in chronological order. Before he could deal with the other rubrics accordingly, he was appointed archivist of the Principality of Basel . The number of categories for this reorganization has been reduced several times, e.g. B. by combining the individual rubrics on foreign locations via a collective heading "Foreign locations", nevertheless still formed the basis around 1885 on which the then planned reorganization of the archive should be based.

The Catholic clergyman and poor father Ferdinand Weiß was awarded the rank of archivist in 1798 because of his work on the estate constitution of the Breisgau, and shortly thereafter the rank and salary of a lifelong magistrate. This made Weiß the first actual archivist in the city of Freiburg. During his term of office, the transfer from Freiburg to the Grand Duchy of Baden fell in 1806. From then on, the magistrate was no longer a judge of his manors and was demoted to local councilors. The municipal bailiwick offices, which on the one hand extended over the entire Kirchzarten valley with the side valleys into the Höllental , and on the other hand over the dependencies of Betzenhausen and Lehen , were abolished. The documents from the Kirchzarten and Betzenhausen castles, where the town bailiffs had previously resided, were brought to the department store archive. With a registry list and two of his helpers, a new repertory could be created there after the inventory had been sorted.

Although the archival material in the Freiburg Minster had the least influence, there were also grievances there: some of the old chests and boxes had become rotten and collapsed. The entire archive was covered with a thick layer of dust. Many files that were temporarily needed in the town hall registry had not found their way back to the Hahnenturm archive. Important documents, including the original handover contract to the House of Austria, were in private hands. A large number of council and production protocols and older individual documents from the 14th century onwards had been handed over by the city office to the Grand Ducal Provincial Archives located on the Predigertor . Archivist Weiss himself kept a lot of the most diverse documentary material for years in his own apartment for study purposes.

In the town hall, the state had set up the Grand Ducal City Bailiff's Office and only left some rooms in the side wing to the magistrate. The two archival vaults of the Rathshof became the unloading area for council minutes, missive books and other documents and files that had previously been kept in the large corner room above the gate entrance. The municipal registry was used as a place for the interrogator of the Grand Ducal City Bailiff Office. A visit report dated April 23, 1824 describes the state of the archive in more detail. So all the windows in both vaults were broken and the window frames were rotten. Individual drawers would have been completely missing, while the archives lay scattered in high piles on the floor with old saddles and coat bags in between. In addition to numerous spider webs, the viewer drove the musty smell back from the lower vault.

Archive in the Hahnenturm (around 1906)

Heinrich Schreiber , historian and prefect of the Freiburg grammar school , offered himself as the city archivist after the death of the magistrate and archivist Weiß at the end of 1822. While the city administration agreed and immediately made him an honorary member of the council and archivist, the Baden Ministry of the Interior refused permission and pointed out that he was incompatible with his work as school rector. Schreiber had decided to write a history of the city of Freiburg. Before that, however, he concentrated on editing a document book that he wanted to send ahead of the work. Although this made him de facto the actual archivist of the city, this activity largely prevented a reorganization of the holdings. Poinsignon sees Schreiber's main focus on the cathedral, since he did not significantly change the internal organization of the Ratshof archive. To this end, Schreiber had the 507 volumes of council and production protocols scattered in these vaults and in the department store bound, for which this had not yet been done. They were then placed in a chronological order in a room in the side wing in the council courtyard, which had been given to him as an office. He had structural repairs carried out in the various archive buildings and ensured the return of the documents from private hands and the provincial archives and their association with the department store archives. The Münster archive received transportable boxes based on a system from the St. Blasien monastery . Under his supervision, as a result of the new municipal constitution in 1833, a larger outsourcing of foundation documents to the foundation administration in the Heiliggeistspital took place. This included material relating to the sick hospital, the St. Antonien Preceptorat, the Blatternhaus, the foundling house and the poor hostel. Schreiber also planned to compile a real catalog of the council minutes, but he did not succeed. Poinsignon attests to Schreiber that “repertorising and cataloging was not his strength”.

Schreiber withdrew from the management of the archive in 1835, so that it was initially without dedicated management. The former registrar Elgg arranged and recorded the files of the Talvogtei, as these were urgently needed for the tithe replacement in Baden . In addition, according to Poinsignon, he provided the backs of other documents with “a brief, but not always correct summary”. Elgg left the archive in 1840 after his office from the Franciscan monastery at the town hall “moved all of its holdings to a dark and draughty room in the neighboring civil prison in the so-called. Stadtthurm ”had been relocated to Turmstrasse. The files were later returned to the attics of the town hall.

From then on, archive supervision was transferred to the municipal building administration. Its director Joseph Rösch wrote some works on the city's history. In addition, he repertorated the materials not dealt with by Maldoner. Instead of inserting them into Maldoner's archive plan, however, he used the scheme of the Baden archive order by Johann Nicolaus Friedrich Brauer from 1803.

In 1855 the Grand Ducal City Office cleared the town hall so that the magistrate could set up a suitable office for an archivist. The choice to fill this position fell on the already retired court clerk Cajetan Jäger (1798-1887). The initial salary of 100  florins had to be compensated by a corresponding reduction in salary for the building assessor, who was also advertised. Jäger took care of the transfer of older files from the holdings of the current registry to the archive. The lower vault in the council courtyard was cleared because the adjacent terrain had been raised and the vault had become even more humid. Since 1840, documents and files had been piled up in heaps in the attic of the department store because the archives there had to be handed over to the customs union officials . These sorted hunters too.

At the beginning of the 1860s, the archivist was also given supervision over exhibits such as antiques, armor, instruments of torture, paintings, old coin dies that were collected next to his office, as well as the public library in the Ratshof, which was set up at about the same time . Between 1864 and 1865, the city decided to add additional floors to the back building of the council courtyard, where the large council chamber and the archives were located. This third floor received a large, bright hall and an adjoining study for the archive and the library. The antiquities collection was housed in the former Augustinian hermit monastery , which was later to become the Augustinian museum . The library and antiquities collection grew soon afterwards through several large donations. As recently as 1885, the city archivist held these additional functions of city librarian and chairman of the antiquities collection.

The documents moved to the Heiliggeistspital came back into the possession of the city archives in 1833. Shortly before that, she had sold their stewards for the parchment value, which was £ 87 at 5 fl. 30 kr. Previously, he had cut off the wax seals and melted them down. The documents came to the Germanisches Museum and were bought back from there. When moving these and other documents, it was neglected to adhere to the older repertories of Maldoner, Weiss and Rösch. This required a subsequent reconstruction of the archive on this basis in order to ensure that each individual document could be found. Since Jäger was almost completely blind in the meantime, some of the archives did not get back to their designated place and the repertoire of the hospital documents could no longer take place.

The city library grew steadily. After a large amount of files from the municipal timber or forestry office had reached the archive and a few hundred volumes of city bills had been added by the municipal tax office, the archive was again overcrowded. Therefore, it was extended into the covered corridor that connected the former prison, the above-mentioned city tower, which was destroyed in 1944, with the old courthouse. The forest and older Rentamts files could be placed there. In the upper hall, the arrangement and number of shelves have been optimized to gain more space.

At the beginning of 1894, the first professionally trained archivist Peter Paul Albert took office . The city prison was designated as an archive building in 1896, so that the establishment of the entire archive could follow. In 1906 the stock was housed by building a magazine. Since about 1910 Albert was supported by three additional scientific archivists. The order of the entire inventory of documents and their listing in regesta could thus be completed in a relatively short time.

During the Second World War , the documents and files in the archive were packed in 260 boxes and initially housed in the Günterstal Abbey orphanage . From March 1940 the stocks were stored in the former parchment room of the St. Blasien monastery. The archives of Neuchâtel, Burkheim, Ehaben, Endingen and Breisach near the border had some of their archives secured by the city archive. After the bomb-related fire of the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe in September 1942, the city library was also relocated in December 1942. She stayed in the Hansjakobzimmer of the Freiburg Charterhouse . During the air raid on Freiburg on November 27, 1944, the archive building on Turmstrasse was destroyed and burned down the following day. The rear magazine building was rescued on the same day by the Villingen fire brigade. The losses were limited to parts of the war chronicle from the First World War and to some newspaper years since 1900 that had not yet been outsourced.

Magazine for Grünwälderstrasse

While the administration was housed in the Colombischlössle after the end of the war , the retrieved archives were distributed to five locations across the city. In 1957, the move to the current location followed, also known as the St. Blasianerhof, the Haus zum Herzog in Salzstrasse. In addition to user and administration rooms, the library was set up there. A magazine wing in the direction of Grünwälderstraße, which was started in 1961, was ready for occupancy in 1964.

With the retirement of the archive director Hans Schadek in 2002, the archive lost its independence as an office and has been a department of the cultural office ever since. Ulrich P. Ecker was head of the city archive from 2002 to 2016, and Andreas Jobst has been the director since 2016. The city archive is also the office of the Breisgau history association Schau-ins-Land .

Stocks

The inventory includes approx. 22,000 documents, 380 manuscripts beginning in the 14th century, 50 regulations and statutes since the 13th century and 484 beraine / Urbare since the 15th century. Approx. 700 volumes of the council minutes and 60,000 council letters have been preserved since the 14th century. In addition, there is a very large number of documents from the municipal administration plus those from the municipalities. Selected estates of private individuals and corporations as well as stored holdings and collections are also archived here. An example is the estate of Fritz Geiges ; the archive material is in the city archive, the artistic work in the Augustinermuseum .

Publications

The first publication that was created from archive material is Ulrich Zasius' Freiburg municipal law from 1520, which is still in the holdings. This was followed in 1828 by the publication of Heinrich Schreiber Das Urkundenbuch der Stadt Freiburg i. Br .; the change from purely practical to scientific interests is also understandable here.

The Stadtarchiv has also published books on a regular basis since 1890, a total of 41 volumes up to 2016. The Stadtarchiv has been issuing the Neue Reihe series of the Stadtarchiv Freiburg i.Br. since 1981 . out, 21 volumes up to 2016. In 2001 the three-volume history of the city of Freiburg was published.

building

Entrance door and outer wall of what is probably the oldest house in Freiburg (1120) from the outside, now part of the cellar of the city archive, as the floor level was raised by 2-3 m at the end of the 12th century
The fountain with the figure of John the Baptist

The city archive building is located between Salzstrasse and Grünwälderstrasse. The access to the city archive is on Grünwälderstraße. The building complex is located above one of the oldest buildings in the city from 1120. The walls of the ground floor and the cellar are still preserved today. The ground floor of today's building rests on these walls and a beamed ceiling from 1263. The age of the beams is proven by dendrochronology .

The building used to have the house name Zum Herzog . Its owners included the town clerk master Johann Gastmeister (1535), the town council member Hans Graf and his son Hans Jakob (1554). It was considered under Philip Jacob Hegelin of Straußberg on moss Weyer House for white cross that Zimmermännsche or regiment House called. In 1688, Franz Ferdinand Meyer , the town clerk and syndic of the city of Freiburg, who later became Mr. von Fahnenberg, lived here .

In 1708, 1775 and 1806 the house was owned by the St. Blasien Monastery before it became the predecessor of the Archbishop's Ordinariate . The same moved in 1906 to the new building on a piece of land that the church had acquired from the city.

In the inner courtyard of the building there is a fountain adorned with a sculpture of John the Baptist . The figure from the Augustinian Museum that originally crowned the trough from 1970 has now been replaced by a copy. These were created by the sculptor Peter Gutmann from Freiburg-Ebnet.

Library

The library of the city archive is a public reference library . The focus is on the history of Freiburg, Baden-Württemberg and the Upper Rhine region. Most of the holdings can be accessed via the Southwest German Library Network.

Personalities

ladder

Surname Year of birth Year of death Entry into service End of service employment
Ferdinand White 1754 1822 1798 1822 part-time, Catholic clergyman
Heinrich Schreiber 1793 1872 1822 1835 part-time, school rector, university professor
Elgg     1835 1841 part-time, registrar
Joseph Rösch 1794 1855 1841 1855 part-time, construction manager
Cajetan hunter 1798 1887 1855 1880 part-time, newspaper editor
Adolf Poinsignon 1836 1900 1880 1891 part-time, infantry captain
Peter Paul Albert 1862 1956 1894 1925 full-time
Friedrich Hefele 1884 1956 1925 1948 full-time
Theodor Zwölfer 1895 1988 1948 1961 full-time
Berent Schwineköper 1912 1993 1961 1977 full-time
Hans Schadek 1937 - 1982 2001 full-time
Ulrich P. Ecker 1951 - 2002 2016 full-time
Andreas Jobst 1969 - 2016 - current head

Archivists (selection)

literature

  • Adolf Poinsignon : Looking back on the past of the city archive in Freiburg im Breisgau . In: Archivalische Zeitschrift 10, 1885, pp. 122–140 ( digitized version ).
  • Karl Schuster : The archive rooms in the cock towers of the cathedral . In: Freiburg Cathedral Papers. Half-year publication for the history and art of the Freiburg Minster 2, 1906, pp. 64–74 ( digitized version ).
  • Berent Schwineköper : The Freiburg City Archives. Task and holdings in the past and present (= Freiburg city books 12). Freiburg i. Br. 1966.
  • Hans Schadek : The city archive of Freiburg im Breisgau. History, tasks, inventory (= city ​​and history 1). Freiburg i. Br. 1981, 2nd edition 1984.
  • Vera Sack: The incunabula of the university library and other public collections in Freiburg im Breisgau . 3 volumes. Wiesbaden 1985 ( This volume also describes all incunabula of the city archive, the Augustinian museum and the foundation administration ).

Web links

Commons : Stadtarchiv Freiburg  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Hans Schadek: The city archive Freiburg im Breisgau. History, tasks, inventory . Freiburg i. Br. 1981, p. 9.
  2. ^ A b Hans Schadek: The city archive Freiburg im Breisgau. History, tasks, inventory . Freiburg i. Br. 1981, p. 10.
  3. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär : Freiburg in the air war 1939-1945 . Ploetz, Freiburg im Breisgau 1990, ISBN 3-87640-332-4 , p. 266.
  4. ^ A b Thomas Goebel: Andreas Jobst is the new head of the Freiburg City Archives. Badische Zeitung, December 19, 2016, accessed on October 18, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Freiburg City Archives holdings.
  6. ^ Adolf Poinsignon : Historical description of the city of Freiburg im Breisgau Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau 1978, ISBN 3-7930-0105-9 , p. 234 f.
  7. ^ Rosemarie Beck, Roland Meinig: Fountain in Freiburg . Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau 1991, ISBN 3-7930-0550-X , p. 36.
  8. ^ A b Wolfgang Leesch : The German archivists 1500–1945. Volume 2: Biographical Lexicon. Saur, Munich a. a. 1992, ISBN 3-598-10605-X , p. 131 and a.
  9. ^ Joachim Dietrich Schaar: City archivist Cajetan Jäger. Life and accomplishments . In: Journal of the Breisgau History Association (Schau-ins-Land) 106, 1987, pp. 301-307 ( digitized version ).
  10. ↑ GND 123858151