About the Archives
Founded in 1988, the Archives of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research house an expanding collection of materials relevant to the Institute’s research, publications, and exhibition activities. These include records and papers, gray literature, flyers, periodicals, posters, photographs, and audiovisual media. The collections reflect the themes and issues of work conducted here, with a special focus on contemporary history and protest movements in post-war Germany.
Parallel to ongoing efforts to establish and expand the special collection on protest movements, new tasks have emerged for the Archives over time. In the course of work on large-scale exhibition and research projects at the Institute, documents on violence in the twentieth century, the history of the Nazi regime, and crimes perpetrated by the Wehrmacht during World War II were integrated into the Archives’ holdings in the 1990s. Since 2000, new holdings from the field of empirical social research have also been added.
The special collection on Protest, Resistance and Utopia in the Federal Republic of Germany comprises the largest section of the Archives. It contains source information on protest movements that have emerged since the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany to the present, documenting these movements’ various phases of political, social, and cultural conflict. The term protest movement describes the wide range of activities of people who have initiated or participated in political controversy outside the political party system, parliaments, and large organizations.
Further collections of material and source information have been created during the course of research projects carried out in the Institute in the social sciences and contemporary history. These have been consolidated in the Collections Related to Research Projects. In specific cases, the Archives have also integrated documents and collected materials that are not directly related to current research at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. With some restrictions, this section is publicly accessible.
A third section archives the institutional papers of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS). This includes documents pertaining to research projects (correspondence, contracts, etc.) and other departments and activities at HIS (such as the Archives, the Library, the former Press Office, events, committees, and the like). As a rule, these archives are not open to the public.
The Archive’s holdings are available to the Institute’s research projects and to an interested public.
Archives of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research
Mittelweg 36, 20148 Hamburg, Germany
Phone: +49 40 414097-31
Fax: +49 40 414097-11
Send an email
Staff
Philipp Brendel, Madeleine Gebhardt, Dieter Schröder, Britta Stamm
Director
Svenja Kunze
