History of the inventory creator

The North German Mission was founded in Hamburg in 1836 by six missionary associations as one of the oldest German missionary societies. It has been based in Bremen since 1851 and today is a joint work of four German and two African churches. After initial activities in New Zealand and the East Indies, the North German Mission also sent missionaries to West Africa from 1847. The missionary work in West Africa, which has been carried out continuously since then, has resulted in two independent churches: the Evangelical Churches of Togo and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Ghana. In these two countries, the North German Mission still focuses on its missionary and, today, development policy activities. In over 150 years of presence in Africa, the North German Mission has experienced all the ups and downs of German-African relations in its West African mission centers. This includes the pre-colonial presence, the colonial period following the founding of the colony of German Togoland in 1884 and the difficult post-colonial development from the First World War to the present day. Recruited throughout Germany and sent out from the headquarters in Bremen, generations of missionary workers were active in Africa in mission, school and development service and recorded their work in letters, reports, minutes and also photographic documentation. Conversely, African mission workers found their way to Germany early on for training. Over the course of more than 150 years, a unique archive collection has thus been created at the mission headquarters, which has hardly suffered any significant loss of material, even through the numerous political upheavals and military events. It is supplemented by a collection of pictorial documents which, like the written records, date back to the 1840s. A special library was also set up at the Bremen mission headquarters, which was primarily used for internal training purposes of the mission and contains numerous manuscripts and early prints in West African languages - in particular the Ewe language spoken in present-day Togo.
Transfer of the collection to the Bremen State Archives
On November 18, 2005, the archives, image collection and library of the North German Missionary Society were handed over to the Bremen State Archives. The documents, image collection and mission library are now available for research in one place. The archive of the North German Mission is one of the most important archive holdings in the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen. Its value and importance for research was recognized early on. Even during the Second World War, the State Archives took over numerous archival records in order to bring them to safety together with the state archives. In 1968, a contract was concluded under which the collection was transferred to the Bremen State Archives as a deposit (StAB 7,1025). Since then, it has been listed as no. 0503 in the general list of nationally valuable archives in accordance with § 13 para. 2 of the law on the protection of German cultural assets against emigration.

Inventory history

As the North German Mission was forced to part with its collection and library items in 2005 when it moved into a new but smaller mission house in Bremen and was no longer able to provide reading rooms for academic use in the mission house, it felt compelled to take the step of transferring ownership of the entire collection to the Bremen State Archives at the same time as transferring the remaining archive, collection and library items to the State Archives. This was initially done in the certainty that freer access would bring considerable advantages for academic and research use and against the background that archival indexing, especially of the collection and image material as well as the library, could no longer be adequately carried out in the Mission House itself. It was also not possible to ensure optimal long-term storage of the documents in the Mission House. It was agreed at the time of the handover that the collection should continue to receive a steady increase in written and collection material from the North German Mission, which is primarily active in West Africa.
Since 1968, Depositum 7,1025 Norddeutsche Mission has been one of the most frequently requested holdings in the Bremen State Archives for academic - and international - use. Since 2003, it has been used intensively for a research project of the University of Bremen funded by the VW Foundation, in which researchers and doctoral students from Togo and Ghana were also involved under the direction of Dr. Rainer Alsheimer, and the files had already been formed and recorded by an employee of the North German Missionary Society when they were delivered to the archive: In the 1970s and 1980s, Paul Wiegräber had compiled a file index and labeled the file folders with shelfmarks. During this time, larger and smaller amounts of written material were added to the collection several times - materials from older times, but also collection items that had accumulated in cooperation with the churches in Ghana and Togo at the time.
With the takeover of the archive material, the State Archives undertook to restore, pack and index the existing and especially the newly acquired image and library holdings. To this end, after returning from loan to the Transkulturation project in 2004, the archive holdings were systematically reviewed, the existing packaging materials were supplemented and the labeling was renewed. The documents in the collection are often loose; in particular, the sometimes extensive units in which the semi-official correspondence with the mission staff is filed are still very much at risk in terms of their preservation and internal organization.
The archive holdings had already been microfilmed in the 1970s as part of the federal government's back-up filming work; these films were returned to the State Archives after copies had been made and could be used. The subsequent deliveries to the collection will be filmed in 2007 so that user films can be made available for the entire collection. In future, copies will only be made of the films in order to avoid having to make copies of the documents themselves. To this end, the structure was greatly expanded in order to appropriately organize the previously little-noticed documents that were not directly related to the activities of the missionary staff in Africa and Australia. Where available, surviving titles were included in the index. The documents relating to missionary activities in the narrower sense, to which the older indexes were limited, had already been extensively indexed. In addition, the evaluations compiled by various members of the Transkulturation project were available, which were based on the older lists, but also contained descriptive texts, including transcriptions and translations. This information was evaluated for the file index, so that information on the scope and the languages used in the written material is available for this area of the inventory.
The image collection, its acquisition and processing
The North German Missionary Society has used the medium of photography since the 19th century to document its work internally and to present it to the public. The photographs, mostly taken by missionaries as part of their work in the African mission field, were not only kept as memorabilia, but were also used in slide shows for the public and at internal training events, and were often printed in the missionary society's publications.
An extensive stock of photo prints, systematically filed, forms the core of the archive. These photos were indexed in various lists and were often labeled and dated on the back. Another focus of the collection is on the portraits of the mission staff, which were apparently systematically collected and stored from the beginning of the mission's activities and the spread of photography, and the mission staff and various people associated with the mission also created their own collections and added them to the missionary society's photo collection. The collection contains several albums of individual missionaries and the German-Togo Society, as well as slide series from the lecture activities. Only a single album of photo negatives has been preserved. The existing slides are likely to be copies that were made from the recording media or prints. The collection comprises 5,316 individually listed photos, many of which have been handed down several times. They are all black and white photos, a few pieces are colored, two drawings are in color.
As part of the Transculturation project, which was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and carried out under the direction of Dr. Rainer Alsheimer at the University of Bremen between 2003 and 2005, the religious studies scholar Sonja Sawitzki worked intensively with the image collection. She recorded the titles and dates of the photographs, signed and packaged the items and prepared them for reproduction. In particular, notes on duplicate image content were incorporated. The physical condition of the pieces was also described, with the size and state of preservation and any existing defects listed. With regard to the type of image, the editor distinguishes between prints, drawings, prints, postcards and the various film and glass materials, and there are also references to mounts on cardboard or in albums. Many photo prints are not in good condition, heavily faded, soiled or incomplete. The albums and portfolios often contain prints from which no high-quality originals can be obtained. As a rule, however, it was possible to find the originals for the prints elsewhere in the collection.
All existing images are now listed in the index to fonds 7,1025 Fotos. The existing prints and their signature, the repro or surviving negative or slide are listed and the identifier of the corresponding image file is given. As part of the content indexing, the image title and date are given, as well as additional information that Sonja Sawitzki noticed or found useful, that has been handed down with the items or that was filed in connection with indexing approaches by other processors in the past. Particularly important are the references to duplicates that were found in different contexts and identified together. Different titles for such duplicates have been regularly included, as some unlabeled photos could be assigned in this way. Missing titles have been added, preferably on the basis of labeled duplicates; added titles are indicated in square brackets. Images unsuitable for reproduction and items that were already recognized as duplicates during the first round of work have not been reproduced. In these cases, the image content of the duplicate is shown in the index and the image file of the reproduced duplicate is indicated. This applies above all to the photographic prints, which have already been filed systematically by the North German Missionary Society. Other classification features found were derived from the context of the photo albums and slide boxes. Only the items that had not been filed in any particular order were arranged according to a rough chronology, while the undated and unmarked items were grouped according to motifs. There are a large number of duplicates, particularly among the undocumented image originals, which could not be easily assigned to the better documented items due to the large size of the inventory. No evaluation of the file inventory was carried out in the production of the image annotations - numerous photos, especially portraits, could certainly be labeled more precisely on the basis of the file inventory.
The images can be viewed in an online presentation. The image descriptions and formal data are reproduced there, and a preview is intended to give an impression of the image content. The images will only be shown in specially justified cases. All images are available as black and white reproductions on film, unless negatives or slides have survived. Image files are also available for the images, which were created using the existing repros with a resolution of 400 ppi. Reproductions and image data are available from the Bremen State Archives.
The Bremen State Archives also took over the extensive special library of the North German Missionary Society along with the files and photographs. The books in the library are kept in a special section of the State Archives and are indexed as individual works according to standard library procedures. This index lists all titles published by the North German Missionary Society itself or by individual members of its staff. For the other works, the systematic classification is given; the titles can be searched in the library's online reference systems.
Bremen, May 2007
B. VeilContains Mission in New Zealand and the East Indies, especially letters and reports - Mission in West Africa, especially letters and reports from the main stations, service of African workers, school system and seminary, travel reports and maps, Bible translation, church ordinances, building matters and land acquisition, accounting, slavery, liquor trade, individual missionaries - institutions in Germany, in particular educational establishments and seminaries, management and administration of the missionary society, aid societies, international cooperationBlack-and-white negatives in ideal format were made from the surviving paper images, whereby the images already recognized as duplicates and most of the prints were not taken into account. During the reproduction process, signature labels were added to the photographs, which can now be seen in the image field of the online presentation. The surviving paper images were arranged in folders of approx. 50 pieces, the signature of the folder was noted, as well as the signature of the folder in which the created reproduction is stored. Some pieces or groups of objects - the existing stereo recordings, two daguerreotypes, the glass slides etc. - have been packed separately and are stored in separate folders. - have been packed separately and are stored in specially created units so that they can be better preserved. The existing repros and surviving film negatives were scanned by a service company and the data generated in this way was stored on CD in accordance with the standard used in the Bremen State Archives - 400 ppi, 256 gray scales, TIFF format. The items on glass were scanned at the Bremen State Archives. Preview images with a smaller data content were created from the image data in archive format.

Explanation: The company was run under this name as its own business since 1888 by Johann Karl Vietor, but was able to make use of the branches in Ghana, Togo, Dahomey, Cameroon, Liberia and Guinea, which had been founded by other members of the Vietor family since 1857. After the severe setback in the First World War, the company was rebuilt in Liberia, Ghana and Togo, but this was destroyed by the world economic crisis, so that the company died out in 1932. It was partly in close contact with other companies co-founded by J. K. Vietor. Content: Business papers before the First World War, in particular land purchases, inventories, insurance of factories in Togo (Anedlo, Palime, Lomé), in Ghana (Keta) and in Dahomey (Porto Novo) - Complete company registration after the First World War, in particular Reich compensation for war and colonial damage, correspondence with other companies and own branches - Liquidation

1. on the Gauger/Heiland family: Joseph Gauger is the first person documented in the collection with originals. He was descended from a Swabian family that can be traced back to the 16th century and that early confessed to Pietism. His father, Johann Martin Gauger (1816-1873), was head of the Paulinenpflege, his half-brother Gottlob Gauger (1855-1885) was in the service of the Basler Mission and was active 1878-1888 in Africa at the Gold Coast and afterwards in Cameroon, where he died. Joseph Gauger's brother Samuel (1859-1941) was also a pastor and last dean in Ludwigsburg. Born in 1866 in Winnenden, Joseph Gauger became an orphan early on, at the age of 13. He graduated from the Karlsgymnasium in Stuttgart. He first attended the teacher training seminar in Esslingen and became a teacher in Dürnau after graduating. From 1889 to 1893 he studied law in Tübingen, then Protestant theology. Afterwards he became vicar in Mägerkingen and Großheppach, 1898 finally town parish administrator in Giengen. The emerging Swabian career was broken off by the marriage with Emeline Gesenberg from Elberfeld. She was to stay in Elberfeld to care for her father, so the young couple moved into their parents' house in Hopfenstraße 6. There was also a Pietist community in Elberfeld. Joseph Gauger found employment as the second inspector of the Protestant Society, which provided him with a solid foundation for an equally pietistic career in his new Rhineland homeland. Later he was able to obtain the position of Director of the Evangelical Society. The Evangelical Society in Elberfeld had dedicated itself to mission in Germany since 1848. Here Gauger became responsible for the publishing work and the so-called writing mission. Since 1906 he was editor of the weekly "Licht und Leben", an activity he carried out until 1938, shortly before his death. From 1923 he also published the widely read political monthly "Gotthardbriefe". In 1911 Gauger became a member of the board of the Gnadauer Verband and in 1921 - not least because of his musical talent - chairman of the Evangelischer Sängerbund. In 1921 he also became a member of the Constituent Assembly of the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union. His favourite sister Maria married Jakob Ziegler, who worked at the Ziegler Institutions in the pietist community of Wilhelmsdorf (near Ravensburg) as a senior teacher and later director at the boys' institution. Due to the very intensive correspondence and frequent visits to his sister, Joseph Gauger remained attached to Swabian pietism. During the Third Reich, Joseph Gauger and his family were followers of the Confessing Church. Joseph Gauger was finally banned from publishing, his publication organ "Licht und Leben" was banned, and in 1939 he was expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer. In 1934 his son Martin refused the oath to Adolf Hitler, whereupon he - a young public prosecutor - was dismissed from public service. Since 1935 he has worked as a lawyer for the 1st Temporary Church Administration of the German Evangelical Church and since February 1936 for the Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany in Berlin. When the war broke out in 1939, he also refused military service and fled to the Netherlands. However, he was seized here, arrested and later taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He therefore had to give up his church service in 1940. In 1941 he was murdered by the Nazis in the Sonnenstein Killing Institute near Pirna. The younger son of Joseph Gauger, Joachim, was also harassed by the Gestapo for his work for the Gotthard Letters and "Light and Life". After the death of Joseph Gauger (1939) and the complete destruction of the Gauger House in Elberfeld following an air raid in June 1943, the family returned to the south. Siegfried Gauger, after a short time as town vicar in Schwäbisch Gmünd, had already become town priest in Möckmühl in 1933 and had settled there with his wife Ella. Martha Gauger has lived in Heidenheim since her marriage to Theo Walther in 1934. Hedwig Heiland moved in 1943 to Gemmrigheim, the new parish of her husband. The parsonage there also offered space for the mother Emeline Gauger and the nanny of the Gauger children, Emilie Freudenberger. A little later, after her early retirement in 1947, her sister Maria Gauger also moved to Gemmrigheim. After his release from captivity as a prisoner of war, Joachim Gauger had also moved professionally to Möckmühl, where he ran the Aue publishing house. Only Paul Gerhard had stayed in Wuppertal, where he lived in the Vohwinkel district. Emeline Gauger's mother and sister Maria moved from Gemmrigheim to Möckmühl in 1951, which became the centre of the Gauger family, as a result of the forthcoming move of the Heilands to Stuttgart. Because now the mother lived here with three of her children: Siegfried, Maria and Joachim. The family gathered here regularly for sociable celebrations and the grandchildren of Emeline Gauger often came to visit here during the holidays. It was not until the grandson generation of Emeline and Joseph Gauger entered working life in the 1970s that the family scattered throughout Germany. Despite everything, this generation remained in contact with each other and organized regular family reunions. 2nd history of the stock: Bettina Heiland, Marburg, and Susanne Fülberth, Berlin, handed over the family documents Gauger/Heiland to the Main State Archives for safekeeping in January 2011 after the death of their mother Hedwig Heiland. Some further documents were submitted in June 2013. Hedwig Heiland, née Gauger, born 1914, was the youngest child of Joseph and Emeline Gauger and had survived all siblings and close relatives at the age of 96. The documents handed over originate from different persons in the family. Important documents come from her aunt Maria Ziegler, her father's favourite sister who lives in Wilhelmsdorf. She kept the letters of Joseph Gauger and his wife to their relatives in Wilhelmsdorf (to which she also belonged), a remarkable series of correspondence. Memorabilia such as her place card for the wedding of Joseph and Emeline in Elberfeld in 1898 and individual books by Joseph Gauger and the history of the family are also included. After her death Hedwig Heiland received her from her daughter Ruth Dessecker. Other documents come from mother Emeline Gauger, including letters to her and valuable memorabilia as well as files. They must have come to Hedwig Heiland after her death in 1964 or after the death of her daughter Maria, who lived with her. The documents of the brother Siegfried, city priest in Möckmühl, who died in 1981, are also rich. They date back to before 1943, when the parents' house in Elberfeld was destroyed. Worth mentioning are the dense series of letters of his brother Martin (the Nazi victim) and his parents, as well as his sister Hedwig to him. Furthermore there are letters of Sister Maria (until she moved to Möckmühl in 1950). Less dense is the letter tradition of the brothers Paul Gerhard and Emil Gauger to the city priest. Only the memorial book of the young Siegfried, which has a very high memorial value, his children did not want to do without. It is therefore only available as a copy, but in two copies. Sister Maria Gauger was primarily important as a photographer from the early days of Elberfeld. In addition to files on her own life and fate, she kept a family guest book in Möckmühl, which contains many interesting entries on family life and mutual visits. This is also included in the original stock. Her cousin Maria Keppler, née Ziegler, and her husband Friedrich also sent documents to Hedwig Heiland, especially correspondence and photographs. After the death of her husband Alfred in 1996, the documents of the older family Heiland also came to Hedwig Heiland and were kept by her. These were correspondences and the pastor's official records as well as family history materials, investigations and genealogical tables, but also documents from the mother Anna Heiland. In addition, the family of Hedwig and Alfred Heiland had a large number of younger records. Hedwig Heiland also proved to be a collector here, who rarely threw away a document and preferred to keep it. It didn't stop at collecting and picking up. Hedwig Heiland also arranged the documents and supplemented them with his own notes and investigations. Numerous notes on the family history of Gauger bear witness to this. Hedwig Gauger read the letters from her youth, extracted important dates and took notes. On the basis of the documents she kept and evaluated, she made a film in 2007 entitled "This is how I experienced it. Memories of my family and my life, told by Hedwig Heiland née Gauger" (DVDs in P 39 Bü 469). It consists essentially of an interview with her and numerous photos about her life and the fate of her family. Hedwig Heiland was particularly committed to the rehabilitation of her brother Martin. She intensively supported the research on his fate with information, compilations and also with the lending of documents. She collected the results, i.e. books and essays, and compiled the state of research almost completely. For the exhibition "Justiz im Nationalsozialismus" she read letters of her brother Martin Gauger and other documents about his life, which are stored as audio documents on a CD (P 39 Bü 468). Despite the richness of the available material, gaps in the tradition are to be noted. The sudden destruction of the Elberfelder Haus der Gaugers in 1943 resulted in a severe loss of family documents. About Maria Ziegler from Wilhelmsdorf and Siegfried Gauger, who did not live in Elberfeld anymore at that time, other documents from this time have fortunately been preserved, which compensate this gap somewhat. Another gap exists in the correspondence of Hedwig Heiland during the 70s to 90s of the last century. Even then, there must have been a rich correspondence, of which there is hardly anything left. The correspondence of Hedwig Heiland, on the other hand, which has been richer again since 2000, is present; it was hardly ordered, but has not yet been thrown away. In 1993 documents concerning Martin Gauger were handed over to the Landeskirchlichen Archiv Hannover for archiving. They received the inventory signature N 125 Dr. Martin Gauger. The 1995 find book on these documents is available in the inventory as no. 519. 3rd order of the stock: The documents originate from different provenances and had been arranged accordingly. A delivery list could be prepared and handed over for the inventory. Letters from Hedwig Gauger to his fiancé Alfred Heiland from the 40 years and also the letters in the opposite direction have been numbered consecutively, which points to a very intensive reading and thorough order, which, however, is an extreme case. In the letters Joseph Gauger wrote to his sister Maria after 1920, the covers of the tufts contain summaries of the most important pieces and references to outstanding family events mentioned in the letters. This information can be used as a guide during use. However, the original order of the documents was badly confused by the frequent use by the family and by third parties. One has not or wrongly reduced the taken out pieces. Frequently, individual letters were found in the photo albums with photos that were related to the content of the letter, but had to be returned to the original series. A photo album (P 39 Bü 353) had been divided into individual sheets so that the photos required for publications could be passed on to third parties as print copies. Hedwig Heiland had attached self-adhesive yellow notes to many letters and provided them with notes and references in order to be able to orientate herself better in her family-historical research. For conservation reasons, these notes had to be removed. In addition to the restoration of the original order, further measures were necessary for the order of the stock. Many documents were too broadly characterised as "other" or "miscellaneous". Tufts with very different contents were incorporated into existing units. A larger box still contained completely disordered, but nevertheless valuable letters from the period 1943-1952, which had to be sorted and indexed. Thematically similar tufts could often be combined into one unit. For example, mixed tufts containing letters from different scribes to the same recipient were divided and transformed into tufts with uniform scribes. This order according to the principle "a tuft, a letter writer" could not always be carried out. Letters of the married couple Emeline and Joseph Gauger, for example (to Maria Ziegler) are so closely interlocked that they cannot be split into two separate tufts. Sometimes Emeline signed her husband's letter with a short greeting of her own, sometimes she is greeted in the name of both, but often Emeline wrote her own passages on the letterhead and sometimes there are whole letters from her. Separation is also impossible in terms of content. Similarly, letters from Emeline Gauger and Maria Gauger in their Möckmühl days cannot be separated from those of Siegfried Gauger. Such letters were classified according to the author author. The index refers to the other persons. The present order and indexing was based on family interests. Essentially, in addition to the corrections and restructuring measures mentioned above, the documents had to be arranged and made accessible for scientific research. For this reason, a greater depth of indexing was necessary, above all, by means of title recordings with detailed content annotations. An overall order of the holdings according to the different origins of the documents did not prove to be meaningful for a family archive of the present size. The uniformity of the documents produced by Hedwig Heiland was therefore accepted and maintained. Accordingly, the title recordings of the correspondence of members of the Gauger family are arranged according to the letter writer and not according to the letter recipient. Letters usually contain more information about the author than about the recipient. Letters from non-family members and from letter writers to whom little material has grown, on the other hand, were classified according to the recipient principle ("Letters from different correspondence partners to XY"). The present collection documents the fate of a Swabian family closely linked to Pietism over almost two centuries. Outstanding is the relatively well-known theologian Joseph Gauger, who is richly documented with his correspondence and in his writings. The marriage of his sister Maria Ziegler also gives a glimpse of the Pietist settlement in Wilhelmsdorf and the Ziegler Institutions. The family's attitude during the Nazi period and especially the fate of his son Martin, who was imprisoned for his conscientious objection and finally killed, are also reflected in the inventory. Relations with the family of the Berlin prison pastor and member of the Kreisau district of Harald Poelchau are also documented. Dense series of letters from the Second World War (letters from Hedwig Heiland to her husband Alfred, letters from Alfred Heiland to his wife Hedwig, letters from Maria Gauger to her brother Siegfried) tell of the hard everyday life of the World War II. In addition, the collection illuminates the everyday family life of a Swabian family over at least two generations. The collection comprises 529 units in 5.20 linear metres, the duration extends from 1882 to 2010 with prefiles from 1831. 4. Literature: Article Joseph Gauger in Württembergische Biographien I (2006) S. 87-88 (Rainer Lächele) Article Joseph Gauger in NDB Vol. 6 S. 97-98 (Karl Halaski)Article Joseph Gauger in Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie Bd. 3 S. 584Article Martin Gauger in Wikipedia http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gauger Further literature is included in stockStuttgart, June 2013Dr. Peter Schiffer