Fonds PAW 1812-1945 - PAW 1812-1945 - Prussian Academy of Sciences 1812-1945

Introduction to the Findbuch The Prussian Academy of Sciences has been the most important scientific institution in Brandenburg-Prussia since its foundation in 1700. Outstanding representatives of the humanities and natural sciences have worked at this academy and have left their mark on the files of the academy. The documents resulting from the scientific and business activities of the Academy represent unique historical sources for the German and European history of science and culture. The file collection in the central academic registry between 1700 and 1945 is divided into two collections, one of which contains the written collection of the Academy from the period 1700 to 1811, while the other contains the archival sources of the Academy from the years 1812 to 1945. The caesura between these two central archive holdings is the year 1812, when the fundamental reorganization of the Prussian Academy of Sciences was completed with the statute of January 24, 1812 as a result of Stein-Hardenberg's reforms and the founding of the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1810. The holdings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences (1812-1945) comprise all files that have grown out of the activities of this academy in the years 1812 to 1945 in its central registry. In total, there are more than 2500 units of distortion. In the course of the far-reaching academic reform of 1812, the Academy successively lost its scientific research facilities (observatory, laboratory, botanical garden) and cabinets (physical cabinet, natural history cabinet, herbarium) to the newly founded university, so that it had to redefine its scientific field of activity. As a new main form of scientific work, scientific undertakings were founded at the Academy from 1815 onwards, which were led by academic commissions chaired by a full member of the Academy. In addition to the members of the Academy appointed to the commissions, the work in these large joint ventures was mainly carried out by scientists hired by the Academy to work in the respective positions. On the initiative of August Böckh, the collection of Greek inscriptions (Inscriptiones Graecae) was the first scientific enterprise at the Academy to be established in 1815. In the course of the 19th century, further companies in the field of Greek and Roman archaeology followed, which found their record in the holdings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences (1812-1945) (including Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Corpus Medicorum Graecorum, Aristotle edition, Corpus nummorum, edition of the Greek Christian writers, Prosopographia Imperii Romani, Vocabularium Iurisprudentiae Romanae). Important scientific academy undertakings included the publication of the star charts proposed by Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, the observation of the Venus passages and the publication of the history of the fixed starry sky. The workstations/commissions set up for the humanities and natural sciences academy enterprises have largely developed into independent registry sculptors and therefore form their own archive holdings. In addition to the Academy's more than 50 own scientific undertakings, which were led by Academy commissions, the Academy also provided considerable financial support for research projects outside the Academy. Since the middle of the 19th century, the spectrum of the Academy's activities has also been expanded by the 50 or so foundations established by the Academy, most of whose funds were used to finance research through interest income. The surviving foundation documents occupy a large place in the central file inventory. During the Second World War, the Prussian Academy of Sciences (1812-1945) was relocated to a salt mine shaft near Bernburg an der Saale together with the other archive holdings of the Academy Archive for safety reasons. At the end of the war, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) ordered the stored archive material to be returned to the now reopened German Academy of Sciences in Berlin in the summer of 1946, with only a few exceptions. The few records of the Prussian Academy of Sciences that the Soviet army mistakenly brought into the USSR, including a volume of the Academy's plenary minutes from 1890 written by E. du Bois-Reymond, E. Curtius, and Th. Mommsen, were returned to Germany at the end of 1990 as a result of the German-Soviet negotiations on the exchange of archival material that had been relocated due to the war. The Bremen State Archives, which had been commissioned to inspect the returned archival records, handed over the documents to the Prussian Academy of Sciences to the Privy State Archives of Prussian Cultural Heritage without prior consultation with the Academy Archives. Only after negotiations between the management of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation were these documents returned to the Academy Archive at the beginning of 1996. The division of the found files into several main groups according to factual aspects, which the academy archivist Karl Heinrich Ulrici had carried out in 1832 during the completion of the find book for the files from the period 1700-1811, also served as a basis for the keeping of the registry after the reorganization of the academy in the year 1812. The registry aid created in this way in the course of the following decades resembled in its basic layout strongly the find book for the oldest academy stock. The registry order of the Prussian Academy in the years 1812-1945, which was maintained during the entire activity of the registry trainer, formed the basis for the internal reorganization of the stock. The classification scheme on which the registry order is based was clearly structured according to the subject areas and corresponded as far as possible to archival requirements. However, individual changes in the systematic structure and sequence of the main groups of files were necessary in the interest of a clear inventory structure. Newly included in the files were the receipts for the annual accounts of the Academy, which had been handed over by the Academy in 1903 to the Prussian Secret State Archives for cassation or selection in disregard of their actual source value. Cassations on the receipts were made mainly for the early days of the Academy and for the years 1810 to 1818. After the end of the Second World War, the invoice documents were transferred to the German Central Archive, Merseburg Dept., where in 1959 they were combined into the 182 Repositur and newly recorded. This involved a total of 70 file packages (10 running metres) with invoice receipts from the period 1700-1891. In 1969, the State Archive Administration of the GDR granted an application from the Academy Archives for the return of the invoice receipts, so that the invoice receipts could again be integrated into the two central file stocks of the Academy according to their provenance. For the files of the Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1812-1945), the corresponding accounting documents were assigned to the file main group Financing Matters. The collection of manuscripts, which had emerged as a disintegrated registry, was used to extract the results of financially supported research projects submitted to the Academy and to assign them to the corresponding main files. The unclear registry signatures composed of Roman numerals and alphanumeric characters could not be retained. For the archive signatures, a combination of Roman numerals for the main file groups and consecutive numbers for the file units was chosen. A very high expenditure of time was required for the extensive indexing work on the inventory. For numerous groups of files with a high historical value, an extended indexing was carried out with containment annotations. Ms. Ilse Baumgart/Speigner was the main contributor to this intensive indexing. Due to the fact that most of the personnel records of the Academy members were not created as individual files, but the entire election and personnel events of one or more years were summarised in year files, the creation of corresponding personal indices for the respective year files was necessary for quick access. Each volume file is preceded by a rotulus, which contains all the persons appearing in the file alphabetically, indicating the respective sheet numbers. The notes to the year files in the index also list in alphabetical order all academy members already elected or proposed with the corresponding references. This intensive closure, which was necessary according to the value and significance of the vintage files, resulted in the fact that a typewritten finding aid book for the entire holdings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences (1812-1945) was only available in 1985. In the 1990s, Mr. Stephan Fölske carried out a number of inventory adjustments in order to allocate and index further documents to the inventory. Dr. Wolfgang Knobloch reviewed the finding aid book for an electronic indexing of the inventory and the resulting indexing corrections. The electronic redrawing of the inventory was carried out with the Augias software. Mrs. Sylvia Rachuj was responsible for the entry of the registration data into the database and the creation of the register of persons.

Foreword:

Archive of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities >> I. Department of History

• German

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• German