Project Overview
Source collections can be trailblazers through the jungle of historical records. They can however follow very different paths, either focusing on the most significant documents of a single archive as does Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (“Documents in the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany” – AAPD) or selecting documents on a broader topic from different archives in different countries as does The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933–1945. Others pursue the task of making a single, central source accessible, as does the collection of Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber’s diaries.
The collections provide sources so that researchers do not necessarily have to travel to the archives, or at least make their work easier with sources that have been prepared, annotated, and placed in their historical context. In this way, they do not only make numerous documents available but also point the way to further archival materials. This is more important than ever before as we face the overwhelming volume of data in the information age.
Only institutions with the size and experience of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) are able to carry out major editorial projects over long periods of time. The IfZ has been pursuing this task since it was founded, with the publication of contemporary history sources constituting a mainstay of its academic tradition.