Foreword: The German Confederation, a confederation of states created by the Federal Act of 8 June 1815 at the Congress of Vienna, initially comprised 34 sovereign princes and four free cities, the last 28 of which were sovereign princes. It also included Denmark for Holstein and Lauenburg, England for Hanover (until 1837) and the Netherlands for Luxembourg and Limburg (from 1839). The only federal body was the Federal Assembly (also known as the Bundestag) in Frankfurt a. M., which met for the first time on 5 November 1816 after lengthy preliminary negotiations and was chaired by Austria as the presidential power. It was responsible for various commissions and other institutions such as the Federal Chancellery Directorate, the Military Commission, the Central Investigation Commission and the Federal Central Authority. The development of the German Confederation into a nation state remained impossible due to the guaranteed sovereignty of the member states and due to the dualism of the two great powers Austria and Prussia as well as the close connection of Austria to its non-German territories. The expansion of the Federal Constitution in the reactionary sense became disastrous. The resulting revolution of 1848/49 sought to transform the German Confederation into a national federal state. The Federal Assembly delegated its powers to the Imperial Administrator and ceased its activities on 28 June 1848. After the failure of the revolution, Austria restored the Bundestag in the summer of 1850, initially against Prussia. Prussia and its allies also returned to the Bundestag after the failure of the Union plans of Olomouc and the Dresden Conferences on the Reform of the Confederation, which resumed its activities on 14 May 1851. Further attempts at reform failed in the aftermath. The German Confederation finally broke up in the Austrian-Prussian conflict. In the Prague Peace of August 1866, Austria recognised the dissolution of the Confederation. The Württemberg legation to the Bundestag or the provisional central power for Germany 1848/49 existed from 1815 to 1866. It had to report all political matters negotiated in the Federal Assembly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Ministry then decided on the further course of action and arranged for the Frankfurt resolutions to be enforced within Württemberg. Like the department so also the files about the Bundestag affairs had a prominent position in the ministry. Own diaries kept separately from the diaries of the main registry can be traced from November 1816 to December 1849 (E 59 Vol. 181-231). In order to distinguish between the general documents of the Ministry kept in blue envelopes, these files were filed in reddish fascicles, as laid down in paragraph 14a of the Rules of Business Procedure of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of January 1824 (E 40/31 Bü 32). The allocation of the file numbers seems to have taken place initially according to an alphabetical structure (as described in the preface of the finding aid book to fonds E 65). But this scheme must soon have proved to be useless. In any case, in the twenties the registry was reorganized, whereby a new system was introduced with light fact file approaches according to chronological order. Only in the series of envoy reports was the old order maintained until about 1845. Between 1872 and 1904, the files must have been transferred from the secret registry of the Ministry to the Directorate of Archives. After temporary storage in the Staatsfilialarchiv Ludwigsburg, they were forwarded to the Staatsarchiv Stuttgart for safekeeping. The Staatsfilialarchiv also drew up lists of items for sale ("Bundesakten" Verz. ad 57 and "Zoll- und Handelssachen" Lit. F). At the time of the transfer, cassations also appear to have been provided for after entries on various envelopes, but these were then omitted for reasons no longer known. The present directory unites the files of the Foreign Ministry concerning the Württemberg Bundestag legation in Frankfurt a. M. from various holdings. The main part consists of archival documents from E 65 Verz. 24, 40 and 57 and E 36 Lit. F. Furthermore, some legation files, which had already been recorded in the eighties, were moved here. The archival records summarised under the keyword "complaints" were dissolved and structured according to the principle of fact files in the same way as the entire holdings. Files that did not come into existence until after the dissolution of the German Confederation in 1866 were assigned to the corresponding holdings of E 40, as were documents originating from other ministries that were returned there according to the principle of provenance. Only empty envelopes of some of the files rearranged in the ministry were left; these were collected. Minutes of the Federal Assembly from October 1816 to 1863 and of the Military Commission from 1837 to 1861 are available in the printed matter room of the Main State Archives. Other Military Commission protocols are also held in E 40/72 Bü 250-262. These logs were therefore not recorded in the record. Old pagination is obsolete. The collection paints a very vivid picture of the time of the German Confederation and the provisional central power in 1848/49 throughout Germany. It contains documents about the resolutions of the Bundestag and their implementation in Württemberg and thus also material about events in Württemberg. The countertradition - albeit to a much lesser extent - is in stock E 65. The indexing took place from 1980 to 1983 and from 1997 within the framework of training by the archive trainees Ronald Asch, Irmtraud Betz, Ernst Otto Bräunche, Elke Koch, Carl-Jochen Müller, Andreas Schmauder, Wolfgang Stetter and Volker Trugenberger as well as by the archive inspector candidates André Kayser, Thomas Krause, Sandra Krischel, Alexander Rantasa, Caroline Schach and Nicole Schütz. Wilfried Braunn then recorded the rest. The online-capable classification of the stock as well as the further editorial work were taken over by the undersigned. The transfer of the title recordings in MIDOSA 95 datasets, which were made on the index forms, was carried out by Ms. Tanja Bürger, Ms. Anna-Maria Diener and Ms. Gisela Filipitsch; Wilhelm Gieb and Doris Köhler took care of the packaging of the archive boxes. The present collection now contains 1737 numbers (the serial number 1433 is not documented) in the range of 43.1 linear metres with a running time from 1815 to 1866, including pre-files from 1771 and post-files up to 1875. Individual documents on economic history up to 1833 can be found in printed form: Prehistory and justification of the German Customs Association 1815-1834. Files of the states of the German Confederation and the European powers. Arranged by W. v. Eisenhart Rothe and A. Ritthaler, Volume I-III, Berlin 1934 Stuttgart, June 2001 Wilfried Braunn Sabine Schnell
