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When founded in 1969 as the Library of the Archive of Social Democracy, the new library only possessed a limited number of original newspapers and periodicals from the historic, pre-1933 German labour movement. During the Nazi regime, the old SPD library in Berlin was pillaged by state institutions and after 1945, the individual stocks were scattered. In 1945, the remaining core of the old SPD library became a spoil of war for the Soviet occupying power. The scanty rest remaining in the Soviet-occupied zone later served as the nucleus for building up the library of the Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the SED Central Committee in East Berlin. For decades, Western researchers virtually had no access whatsoever to the inventories of the SED library.
In the Western zones (and the later Federal Republic), new initiatives were instigated by historically involved social democrats. In this context, it is particularly important to mention the librarians and archivists within the SPD's party executive, namely Rudolf Rothe and Paul Meyer. From returning emigrants, from old party members who had saved their libraries over the Nazi period, and from friendly institutions in Western countries, the two men collected important primary sources of the German labour movement, including many valuable periodicals. Entire sets of issues that had been presumed lost turned up again in the late 1940s and the early 1950s and thus could be made available to the historically interested public. Still it was obvious that even the most committed collection activities would not be able to replace a systematic approach in closing the gaps when it came to the periodical publications of labour parties, trade unions, cooperatives, the workers' culture and workers' sports organisations and left-wing splinter groups. Indeed, filling the gaps with originals was a proposition that would have met with limited success from the outset. Many periodicals titles, newspaper volumes, minutes and annual reports had not survived the War and the Nazi barbarity. All these must be considered irretrievably lost. Other valuable inventories had pulled through the inferno with only one single copy intact. This last statement mostly applies to newspaper titles by German social democracy. Prior to 1933, the proud social democratic newspaper empire had consisted of more than 100 up-and-running daily newspapers. A surprising number of titles weathered the War in town archives, museums or scientific municipal libraries, often evacuated just in time by responsible employees. Immediately after its re-establishment, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's Archive of Social Democracy devoted itself to saving these sources.
In this task, the Archive's library closely cooperated with the Microfilm Archive of the German-speaking Press, a non-profit organisation founded in 1965, whose members were libraries, archive and research institutions dealing with newspapers as a source for or subject of their work.
The Friedrich Ebert Foundation financed to a large extent the putting on microfilm of social democratic daily newspapers in German libraries and archives and generously put these microfilms at the Microfilm Archive's disposal. Numerous domestic and foreign libraries and research institutions benefited from these microfilming activities, because this way they came into possession of reading copies of the most prominent SPD newspapers at a reasonable price. It was mainly the "big" SPD papers which had had long publication periods (usually from 1890 to 1933) which were microfilmed from the 1960s onwards and which gave crucial impetus to the renaissance of the historiography of the German labour movement. In many cases, they even made this renaissance possible in the first place. Titles such as "Vorwärts" (Berlin), "Bremer Bürgerzeitung", "Arbeiter-Zeitung" (Dortmund), "Volksstimme" (Frankfurt/Main), "Hamburger Echo", "Volkswille" (Hannover), "Kasseler Volksblatt", "Rheinische Zeitung" (Cologne), or "Volksstimme" (Lüdenscheid) stand for the microfilming period of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. For its part, the Foundation Library profited from the microfilming of the exile press, which had been entrusted to the German Library as a statutory collection mandate in 1969. Social democratic, left-wing socialist, communist, and trade union organs from the period of 1933 to 1945 were added to the library inventory as microfilms and complemented the extant originals from the archive's large exile collections (SOPADE, International Transport Workers' Federation, International Socialist Fighting Alliance).
Independently, not within the framework of the Microfilm Archive (and there were sound political reasons for this step), what was then the Library of the Archive of Social Democracy in Poland carried out several microfilming projects. Since 1975 the Library has been attempting to preserve the workers' press of the former German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line and to make it more easily accessible for research. The social democratic paper "Volkswacht", which appeared from 1890 to 1933 in Breslau (Wroclaw), and the SPD organ "Schlesische Bergwacht", published from 1911 to 1933 in Waldenburg (Walbrzych), were microfilmed at the University Library of Breslau. The "Volkswacht" microfilming activities in particular rapidly aroused West German researchers' interest in the history of Wroclaw's party organisation, jokingly called "the left wing of the European labour movement outside of Russia" by its, then, chairman Klaus Eckstein. As no other microfilming project before it, the "Volkswacht" filming opened new doors for research and gave the stimulus for a number of remarkable historic works of great significance.
The "Danzig Library" of the Polish Academy of the Sciences at Gdansk witnessed the microfilming of the social democratic "Danziger Volksstimme" and the communist "Danziger Arbeiter-Zeitung". Last year, the Stettin (Szczecin) "Volksbote", which temporarily appeared in Stargard during the time of the Anti-Socialist Law, was microfilmed in a trilateral cooperation project with the Województwo (district) Library of Szczecin. The filming projects were rounded off at the "Silesian Library" at Katowice, where the "Gazeta Robotnicza" was microfilmed, a paper which appeared as the "Organ of German Social Democracy for the Polish Social Democrats" in Kattowitz (Katowice) between 1890 and 1913. During the Polish microfilming projects, which during the past years were marked by major organisational difficulties due to the profound changes occurring in Poland, the Library fortunately was able to rely on the constant willingness to help by the FES representation in Warsaw.
The Library's microfilming activities took on a new quality when a close cooperation between the German Library at Leipzig and the Foundation Library began to develop in 1980. That year, the Library made arrangements in Leipzig which were the root of a close cooperation in the following years. The Library (from 1987 to 1991 called Library of Social Democracy/Library of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation) committed itself to supporting the largest German library in the acquisition of grey literature. To this end, Bonn endeavoured to acquire an additional specimen of the publications by German parties and trade unions for Leipzig. The only institution in the former GDR which had an all-German claim documented this literature in its catalogues and referenced it in the German National Bibliography. Thus, the Western publications became more widely known, and it was possible for East Germans to read them, albeit in an extremely limited manner. The relations between the two institutions of Leipzig and Bonn guaranteed a regular influx of literature by West German parties and trade unions into the Saxon city. It is hardly possible to overestimate the impact this influx had.
In return, the Leipzig-based "General Archive of German-Language Literature" supplied periodicals of the German labour movement to Bonn, which were microfilmed there. Afterwards, the microfilms were unrestrictedly entered into the German inter-library lending system. The German Library also received a backup copy of the films. In 1913, a national bibliography had been created on the initiative of the German publishing trade. Unlike the state libraries, this bibliography did not balk at acquiring members' magazines from the labour movement, but explicitly included the publications by cooperatives, trade unions, workers' leisure time organisations, quasi-union professional bodies, and political parties into its programme. Accordingly, the response and the willingness of the editors and sales managers of the "fourth estate", which had been much spurned until then, to let Leipzig have their literature were quire positive. Unfortunately, the Leipzig collection scope was not extended to newspapers, which meant that there was no chance of comprehensively saving newspapers in the 1980s.
One result of the cooperation between Bonn and Leipzig was the large number of titles on microfilm that West German research had had to do without until then. A considerable number of scientific theses are based almost entirely on microfilms of Leipzig inventories. It is worth pointing out the four-volume series "Socialist Culture and Leisure Time Organisations in the Weimar Republic" (Socialist Graduates' and Intellectuals' Organisations in the Weimar Republic, Socialist Health and Life Reform Associations, Socialist Singing and Stage Culture, and Freethinker and Religious-Socialist Groups), which was published on behalf of the Berlin Historic Commission and whose authors intensively used the microfilmed sources at the Library of Social Democracy/Library of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.
In the 1980s, the Foundation Library and several national and international trade union organisations conducted talks on the future of their unique individual libraries. Two German trade union organisations decided to entrust their library inventories entirely to the care of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. For its part, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation committed itself to documenting the inventories in special stock records, to supporting the scientific reappraisal of its own trade union history and to complementing the inventories by systematic microfilming activities in a sensible manner. This commitment resulted in the library's being able to present two stock records combining valuable originals and microfilmed inventories. (Sources on the history of the Food and Allied Workers Trade Union. A stock record for the precursor organisations of the Food, Catering and Allied Workers Trade Union. Bonn 1984; Construction Workers' Trade Unions in the Library of Social Democracy/Library of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. 2nd edition, Bonn 1986). The volume "Graphic Press in the Library of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation" documents the most recent activities in the field of acquisition and microfilming of trade union publications. A periodicals index by the International Graphical Federation. Bonn 1991.
Another chapter in the microfilming of historic inventories in Germany was opened when the German Research Community (DFG) issued a new support programme aimed at saving and making accessible newspapers as historic sources of the history of the everyday. The intentions of the German Research Community project were mostly congruent with the interests of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and its Library. They used the support funds to film two important Bavarian SPD organs, the Nuremberg "Fränkische Tagespost" (and its precursor paper) and the Augsburg "Schwäbische Volkszeitung" (and its precursor paper), thus setting out in a new direction and closing the much-lamented "Bavarian Gap" the Library had had. Of all the newspapers added to the Library's inventory on microfilm, the "Fränkische Tagespost" was the only preserved SPD paper which survived the Anti-Socialist Law unscathed. Thanks to the support of the German Research Community it was possible to realise the first microfilming project in what was then the GDR in 1984. The Magdeburg "Volksstimme" was the first major central German regional newspaper published by the German labour movement in the time before 1933 to be saved on microfilm. Until then, no such papers had been present in West German libraries at all. The names of prominent social democrats such as Wilhelm Pfannkuch, Erich Ollenhauer, Hermann Beims and Ernst Reuter are inextricably interlinked with the history of the Magdeburg labour movement. The Magdeburg "Volksstimme" is an indispensable source for research into their biographies. The Magdeburg paper was put on microfilm on the premises of the University and State Library of Saxony-Anhalt at Halle. In the same venue, a follow-up project, also supported by the DFG, saw the microfilming of the social democratic Halle "Volksblatt". The experience gained during the microfilming of the historic central German labour movement press was put to good use by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation Library (its official name since 1991) after German reunification. By microfilming the Chemnitz "Volksstimme", the "Volkszeitung für das Vogtland", the Erfurt "Tribüne" and the "Gothaer Volksblatt", the Friedrich Ebert Foundation made major sources of the German labour movement available "in situ" to users in the former East German states. At the same time, these sources are kept in Bonn for national use. Microfilming activities in the former East German states will continue in future, as well. The microfilming projects of the "Nordhäuser Volkszeitung", the "Halberstädter Tageblatt" and the "Mecklenburgische Volkszeitung" are nearly completed.1
1Original published in Germany:
Zu den frühen Verfilmungsaktivitäten der Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. -
In: Deutsche Arbeiterpresse auf Mikrofilm : ein Bestandsverzeichnis der Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung / bearb. von Hermann Rösch, Walter Wimmer und Rüdiger Zimmermann, Bonn : Bibliothek der FES, 1992, S. I - VI.
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