Archives and bequests

The Archives section collects institutional archives on traditional and new social movements as well as private documents from activists in movements of this type.

For the traditional social movements, the focus of the collection is on the labour movement, and especially on the political parties and their women’s and youth organisations, the trade unions, and the workers’ sports and cultural organisations. The new social movements include the ecology movement, the solidarity movement, fair trade, the peace movement and the homosexual and lesbian movement. Added to these come a large number of archived resources from what, at times, have been very short-lived movements, citizens’ initiatives and committees. The Social Archives are also in possession of a collection of letters from eminent persons in the world of politics, academia and culture. The records are predominantly written in German, a small amount  in French and, in rare instances, in Italian.

The finding aids for the institutional archives and bequests can be consulted online. The same applies for the photographs, picture documents and audiovisual media in the Audio + Visual database.