
offered by the Hamburg State and University Library
This volume brings together the contributions to the conference "Weimars (un)getreue Archivare?, which took place on November 26 and 27, 2020 as a joint conference of the University of Hamburg and the Hamburg State Archives.
Archive history in the Weimar Republic is often thought of from its end, from the personal continuities and discontinuities after 1933. In the present volume, the caesura experience of 1918/19, which marked the end of the Wilhelmine Empire, is placed at the center of the discussion. Which theoretical, methodological, and personnel-political cuts in archives went hand in hand with the political reconfiguration taking place under federal and republican auspices? The heterogeneity of the state-run and non-state archival landscape in the German Empire as well as in the Weimar Republic is shown. This heterogeneity prevailed in its complexity and was - in Weimar - characterized by conflicts, which not infrequently centered around the archival tradition itself.
The contributions collected in this volume therefore do not focus on explaining how Weimar's archivists became National Socialists or opponents of National Socialism; instead, starting from the central — often diversely connected — actors, they trace the reaction of archivists to the "system change" in 1918/19 and their search for a social position in the Weimar Republic.