Historical Archive of the City of Cologne

Coordinates: 50°55′51″N 6°57′26″E / 50.930833°N 6.957222°E / 50.930833; 6.957222

Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln
Köln, Stadtarchiv building
Established	14th century
Location	Cologne (Köln), Germany
Type	Archive
Website	Official website

The Historical Archive of the City of Cologne (German: Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln) is the municipal archive of Cologne, Germany. It ranks among the largest communal archives in Europe.

A municipal archive has been taking custody of records in Cologne since the Middle Ages. The oldest inventory of charters in the archive is dated 1408/1409. The oldest document kept in the archive is a charter dated 922 AD.^[1]

The archive contains official records and private documents from all ages of Cologne history, as well as an extensive library of manuscripts. While the adjective "historical" in its name might suggest a closed, complete archive with a focus on older history, the archive is also the official government repository that is collecting the most recent municipal archival records.

The six-story archive building collapsed on 3 March 2009, along with two neighboring apartment buildings. Two residents of neighboring buildings were found dead.^[2] All archive staff and visiting archive users survived, as they could escape after a warning by construction workers. The actual degree of damage to the historical treasures kept in the building is still unknown. A substantial part of the written records of the city's history is believed to have been destroyed.

Legal basis

The work of communal archives in the land of North Rhine-Westphalia is based on the "Archivgesetz des Landes NRW" bill of 1989. The municipal archive of Cologne is also governed by the municipal archive ordinance "Archivsatzung" (last revised in 2007). The federal "Bundesarchivgesetz" bill does not apply.

History

Shrine system

An early method of archiving in Cologne was the so-called Schreinswesen (shrine system), used for documenting citizens' rights. A Schrein (shrine, from Latin scrinium) was a wooden chest or cabinet where parish administrations stored records and charters. Such shrines were used for records storage throughout the Middle Ages, extending into early modern times, most notably in the parish of St. Lawrence near the Cologne town hall. The records concerned mainly real estate transactions and were mostly stored on parchment sheets or in books which subsequently became known as Schreinsbücher (shrine books). In Cologne, these books can be traced back to AD 1130. Similar books from the late 12th century are known from the cities of Metz and Andernach.^[3] In the 19th century, all records of the old Cologne shrine quarters were transferred to the municipal archives.

First traces of a municipal archive

The existence of a municipal archive can be traced at least to the year 1322. In 1326 the city council decided to establish the so-called White Book (Weißes Buch), a book of copies of charters and privileges. Since at least 1370, the archives were located in the Haus zur Stessen.^[4]

Archive in the town hall tower

Cologne City Hall tower, 2007

Detail from the "Kölner Verbundbrief" charter

In medieval Cologne, valuable goods and important trade documents were mostly stored in vaulted warehouses specially built in backyards. This method of storage was used by both business owners and the municipal administration. Documents included privileges, contracts, law case records, maps, seals and documents from the estates of important persons. As the city and its national and international trade thrived and prospered, the municipal administration planned to store the growing number of documents in an adequate space.

On 19 August 1406, the city council resolved upon adding a tower to the town hall. The tower was eventually built from 1407 until 1414 and served, among various other purposes, as a storage room for municipal charters, privileges and securities. Responsible for its construction was Cologne's bursary officer, Roland von Odendorp. The Gothic building with its two tetragonal upper stories and two more octagonal top stories has some similarities to Dutch belfries of the time and rises to 61 m. It contained a wine cellar, an armory, a meeting room for the municipal council, a firefighter guardroom on the very top, and a vaulted room for the municipal archives. Documents were stored in chests or cabinets marked A to X. The "Kölner Verbundbrief" charter, a municipal constitution document of 1396, was granted pride of place in a chest decorated with a crown. From 1414, the archive was directed by a Gewulvemeister (vault master). Later, the direction was taken over by a committee of municipal jurists, the syndici.

In 1594, the records of the Brugge offices of the Hanseatic League (then stored in Antwerp) were transferred to the Cologne archives. These records included copies of the protocols of the diets of the Hanseatic League.^[5] With the 1594 transfer, the Cologne archive became the most important repository of historical material concerning the Hanseatic League and thus concerning the history of Northern Germany in general, only matched by the municipal archives of Lübeck.

On 27 February 1602, the city council ordered that books on jurisdiction and administration were to be bought at the regularly held Frankfurt Book Fair on a regular basis. These were subsequently stored in the municipal archive and were the basis of the Cologne municipal library. The Ratsbibliothek was one of the few Cologne libraries that did not suffer major losses during the French occupation in the early years of the 19th century.

After the secularization of abbeys and colleges of canons in Cologne in the early years of the 19th century, the French government ordered their archives to be stored in the state archives in Düsseldorf. It was not until 1949 that a Cologne mayor succeeded in claiming 19,000 charters and many other records for the Cologne municipal archives.

Acquisitions in the 19th century

Ferdinand Franz Wallraf, collector, portarit by Johann Anton de Peters

In 1818, the city of Cologne was bequeathed Ferdinand Franz Wallraf's major collection of art, books and manuscripts. After Wallraf's death in 1824, his collection of statues and paintings were the cornerstone of the Wallrafianum, now known as the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, one of Cologne's major art museums. The archive and library, then still operated as one entity, were chosen to keep all books and manuscripts. When the institutions were administratively separated in the 1880s, all manuscripts were retained by the archive, while all printed books were given to the library. That is why, unlike most other archives, the Cologne archive boasts a major collection of medieval manuscripts. Both archive and library shared a building until 1934, when the library moved to the newly built building of the University of Cologne.^[6]

From 1815 until he died in 1857, Johann Jakob Peter Fuchs governed the municipal archive as its volunteer director. Fuchs was a friend of Wallraf's who also supervised the incorporation and cataloging of the Wallraf collection in 1824. He reorganized the entire archive and made its contents accessible to scholarly research.^[7]

In 1857, Leonhard Ennen became the first full-time municipal archivist. Among others, he acquired documents from the estate of Hermann von Weinsberg, a 16th-century Cologne jurist famous for his autobiographical writings.

Archive building of 1897

Köln, Stadtarchiv building of 1897 (address: Gereonskloster 12).

From 1894 to 1897, a new building was specially built for the municipal archive and library. The Gothic revival building by architect Friedrich Carl Heimann was inaugurated in December 1897.^[8] The new building was large enough to accommodate the archive in a time of accelerated growth when the city of Cologne incorporated many independent towns and villages.

During World War II the building suffered damage by bombing. However, since all records and manuscripts had been put in safe storage from as early as September 1939, the archive did not suffer any substantial loss.

Since the archive moved to its new location in 1971, the building has been used as a private library by Gerling, a large insurance company.

Archive building of 1971

Facade of the 1971 building

In 1971, a six-story archive building by architect Fritz Haferkamp was built on Severinstraße in the southern part of Cologne's city center.

One goal of the construction was to save archival records from changes in weather and climate while creating a balanced room climate. Contrary to the contemporary trend towards artificial air-conditioning, Haferkamp preferred a structural-physical, self-regulating solution that needed only little additional climate technology. As the "Cologne Model", the building became a paradigm of many later archive buildings.^[9]

For maximum protection of the stack rooms against atmospheric exposure, an armored concrete frame was immured by a brick wall with a thickness of 49 cm. A facade was attached at a distance of 7 cm from the brick wall, made from bright Czech granite. The interior walls were plastered with lime mortar that absorbed air moisture from the inside. The moisture diffused through the brick wall and was drained through the space between the wall and the facade.^[10] Only the basement rooms (located under a ceiling with a thickness of 30 cm) were artificially air-conditioned. Vertical light slots with a height of 130 cm and a width of 25 cm let only diffused light pass to the interior wall, so sunlight was not able to cause any change in temperature. Only the ground floor was equipped with larger windows. The slots were also used for ventilation: opposing slots caused a stream of air that went exactly parallel to the shelf rows.^[9] Each story of the stacks building had a capacity of 4221 linear metres of records on 647 m² of effective surface. Rooms were 2.30 m high, shelves rose to 2.25 m. Each shelf had a carrying capacity of 70 kg.^[11]

The dominating stacks building was 21.4 m high, 48.8 m wide and 16 m deep, yet both the ground floor and the basement of the whole complex were considerably larger. Towards Severinstraße, the ground floor consisted of the main entrance hall and an exhibition room. Adjacent were the reading room, around 20 office rooms, the restoration workshop and various functional rooms. Four courtyards provided natural light to the rear ground floor rooms. The basement included the charters archive, the archival library and, in its center, a treasure bunker for charters and records walled by armored concrete of 60 cm thickness. The building was secured by fire detectors, a carbon-dioxide-based fire-extinguishing system, and a burglar alarm device.^[11]

After the archives had moved from the 1897 building to its new home (April 26 to June 20, 1971), a little under 44% of the whole volumes were used.^[11] The stacks volume was only designed to last 30 years. The maximum capacity was already reached in 1996, so some records had to be outsourced.^[12]

Collapse of the archive in 2009

Collapsed archive and a neighboring building, March 2009

On 3 March 2009 at 1:58 p.m. the archive building collapsed. The exact cause of this catastrophe is not known. It is generally believed, however, that the construction of a new subway line of the Cologne Stadtbahn system is closely related to the collapse. Construction workers who built an underground switch facility noticed that water flooded the building pit. After that, they quickly warned staff and visitors of the archive and told them to leave the building. Shortly after that, an underground landslide into the subway tunnel caused the archive building to collapse.^[13][14] Two adjacent apartment buildings also collapsed, killing two residents.^[15]

In the collapsed stacks building, the main holdings of the archive were stored, including the medieval manuscripts of the Wallraf collection. Around 90% of archival records were buried by the collapsing building. Other holdings, mainly those stored in the ground floor extension with the reading room, such as the film and photograph collection and ca. 40,000 charters could be evacuated. Some other, albeit minor parts of the records had been outsourced and were thus not affected by the collapse. According to the former director Hugo Stehkämper, the collection of 80 "shrine charters" from the 12th century, a seals collection and most inventory books could be saved and remain intact.

Holdings

The archival holdings include(d):

• 65,000 charters from 922 AD to the present
• 26,000 linear meters of records
• 104,000 maps and plans
• 50,000 posters
• 800 estates, literary remains and other special collections

Among the 700 private estates are those of writer and Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll,^[16] and writers Jakob Ignaz Hittorf, Irmgard Keun, Vilma Sturm, Paul Schallück and Hans Mayer, architects Ernst Friedrich Zwirner and Sulpiz Boisserée, collector Ferdinand Franz Wallraf, composers Jacques Offenbach and Max Bruch, conductor Günter Wand, and philosopher Vilém Flusser. Plans and drawings of architects Hans Schilling, Oswald Mathias Ungers, Wilhelm Riphahn, Karl Band, Gottfried Böhm, and Dominikus Böhm were stored in the building.^[17]

All charters and privileges formerly stored in the town hall tower were catalogued in the first inventory (inv. no. "Alte Repertorien 6"). This collection, also known as "Haupturkundenarchiv" (main charters archive), is regarded as the core part of the archive and was hence given the inventory number I.

Until 2009, all registers of births, marriages and deaths were stored at the municipal civil registry offices regardless of their age. Following a reform bill of 13 March 2008, birth registers until 1898, marriage registers until 1928 and death registers until 1978 were transferred to the archives in 2009.^[18]

Many of the most important unique holdings of the Cologne archives have been preserved on microfilm in the central safekeeping archive of Germany, the "Barbarastollen" caves in Oberried in the Black Forest region. The Barbarastollen holds around 638 microfilms with one million of images in varying grades of quality from the various Cologne collections, including the municipal archive. In addition, the 1400 medieval manuscript books of the Archives were microfilmed by the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library in the 1980s.^[19] However, recent acquisitions have not yet been preserved on microfilm, such as the estate of writer Heinrich Böll.^[20] According to director Schmidt-Czaia, the archive has only digitized a tiny fraction of its holdings.^[21]

The Marburg photo archive of old charters holds high-quality black and white photographs of 284 charters from the Cologne archive.^[22]

List of directors

Directors of the Cologne municipal archive:^[23]

Director	Time	Photo
Johann Jakob Peter Fuchs	1815–1857
Leonhard Ennen	1857–1880
Konstantin Höhlbaum	1880–1890
Joseph Hansen	1891–1927
Erich Kuphal	1932–1960
Arnold Güttsches	1960–1969
Hugo Stehkämper	1969–1994
Everhard Kleinertz	1994–2004
Bettina Schmidt-Czaia (* 1960)	2004–

Bibliography

• Die Chronik Kölns. Chronik Verlag, Dortmund 1991, ISBN 3-611-00193-7
• Mitteilungen aus dem Stadtarchiv von Köln (since 1882), for older volumes see de.wikisource
• Wolfgang Herborn: Schreinswesen, -buch, -karte. In: Lexikon des Mittelalters. Vol. 7, cols. 1557–1559

References

1. ^ http://www.koeln.de/koeln/stadtarchiv_27_regalkilometer_urkunden_verschuettet_136336.html; a digitized version is to found at the digital archives website: http://www.historischesarchivkoeln.de/archivdetail.php?id=235&lang=de
2. ^ http://www.stadt-koeln.de/1/presseservice/mitteilungen/2009/03056/
3. ^ W. Herborn, Schreinswesen.
4. ^ Minerva-Handbuch Archive: Archive im deutschsprachigen Raum, 2nd edition 1974, ISBN 3110019558, p. 512, http://www.google.de/books?id=U0BL2gbP8ZUC&pg=PA512
5. ^ Joachim Deeters: Hansische Rezesse. Eine quellenkundliche Untersuchung anhand der Überlieferung im Historischen Archiv der Stadt Köln. in: Hammel-Kiesow (ed.): Das Gedächtnis der Hansestadt Lübeck, Lübeck : Schmidt-Römhild 2005, p. 427-446 (429), ISBN 3-7950-5555-5
6. ^ see Handbuch der historischen Buchbestände.
7. ^ Die Chronik Kölns, S. 252.
8. ^ Die Chronik Kölns, S. 289.
9. ^ ^{a b} Maria Rita Sagstetter: Klimatisierungskonzepte in jüngeren Archivgebäuden in Deutschland p. 3, in: Archivalische Zeitschrift 86 (2004) p. 323-355
10. ^ Wolfgang Hans Stein: Fragen der Anwendung des Kölner Modells im Archivbau. In: Der Archivar 45 (1992) col. 416
11. ^ ^{a b c} Hugo Stehkämper: Neubau des historischen Archivs der Stadt Köln.
12. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 5th, 2009, p. 31
13. ^ Mit großem Besteck; Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 6 March 2009, p. 2
14. ^ Hümmeler, Christian; Matthias Pesch (2009-03-04). "Die Antwort liegt unter Schutt" (in German). Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger. http://ksta.de/html/artikel/1233584102329.shtml. Retrieved 2009-03-07. 
15. ^ One body was found on 8 March 2009, another one on 18 March 2009. http://www.stadt-koeln.de/1/presseservice/mitteilungen/2009/03056/
16. ^ Historical Documents Lost Forever. An Interview with René Böll, Representative of the Heirs of Heinrich Böll and his Son, April 6, 2009
17. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 March 2009, p. 31
18. ^ Press release of the Municipal Archives of Cologne, 1 January 2009
19. ^ http://www.hmml.org/centers/austria_germany/germany/germanylist.htm
20. ^ [1]
21. ^ Press conference of 8 March 2009
22. ^ [2]
23. ^ Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln – Die Chronik Kölns – Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

External links

Media related to City Archives Cologne at Wikimedia Commons

• Official website
• The digital Historical Archive of Cologne
• Friends of the Archive (founded in 2006)