The Institute for History and Biography is a research institution of the FernUniversität in Hagen. Since 1996, it has been a major player in the International Oral History Association and a founding member of the European Umbrella Organization of Diary Archives (since 2015). On a national level, the Institute is a founding member of the Oral History Network, established in 2014, whose annual meetings now bring together 60 oral historians. The Institute is home to the editorial office of BIOS - Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung und Lebensverlaufsanalysen (appearing in its 30th volume in 2018). The Institute enjoys a high reputation in the field of experiential history research, both in Germany and abroad; the combination of experiential history research, archive, journal, and university teaching is unique in Germany.

Under the name Deutsches Gedächtnis, the Institute has been operating a constantly growing archive of eyewitness interviews and other (auto-)biographical sources since 1994, both from its own research projects and from third-party projects that make their research data available for re-analysis by handing it over to the archive. The archive currently contains around 3,000 narrative interviews from over one hundred research projects from various academic disciplines (in addition to history, also education and social science, European ethnology, political science, and psychology). Thematic foci are experiences of fascism and war, concentration camp and camp imprisonment, persecution and traumatization, history of the GDR, migration and refugee experiences, working life, addiction, and youth culture. Around 150 interviews were conducted outside Germany.

The archive's holdings are in demand by scholars from various disciplines in Germany and abroad. Currently, the Archiv Deutsches Gedächtnis is involved in the BMBF-funded project "Kölner Zentrum Analyse und Archivierung von AV-Daten - KA³". Project partners include the Cologne Data Center for the Humanities, the Fraunhofer Institute Sankt Augustin and the Max Planck Institute Nijmegen. In addition, the archive cooperates with the NESTOR network long-term archiving via the Chair of Multimedia and Internet Applications (Prof. Matthias L. Hemmje), among others in the research group "digitale_kultur" established in 2019.

Das Archiv Deutsches Gedächtnis der FernUniversität in Hagen bringt seine umfangreichen Sammlungsbestände, langjährigen Erfahrungen und seine Vernetzung in der Fachcommunity in das Projekt ein und sorgt für die breite Erprobung und nachhaltige Nutzung der Erschließungs- und Rechercheumgebung.

Team:

• Dr. Almut Leh
• Dennis Möbus
• Henriette Schlesinger

Contact:

FernUniversität in Hagen
Institute for History and Biography
Philipp-Reis-Gebäude (5)
Universitätsstr. 27
58097 Hagen