Akademie der Künste Archiv Academy of Arts Archives

Overview

The Archives of the Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) in Berlin are widely regarded as the most important interdisciplinary archives for modern art and culture in German-speaking countries. The Archives hold materials spanning all branches of the arts from the period beginning around 1900, organised into six departments that mirror the Academy's membership structure: Visual Arts, Architecture, Music, Literature, Performing Arts, and Film and Media Arts.

History and Founding

The Akademie der Künste traces its institutional history to the founding of the Prussian Akademie der Künste in 1696. The Historical Archives, which preserves the Academy's administrative documents, contains holdings going back to that founding era. Following the Second World War and Germany's division, two successor academies emerged in Berlin — one in the west (founded 1954) and one in the east (established 1950). Both began building archival collections independently, with a particular emphasis on materials related to exile and the cultural life of German artists under National Socialism. The East Berlin academy acquired the personal papers of Heinrich Mann as its first estate; the West Berlin academy acquired the estate of Georg Kaiser. In 1993, following German reunification, the two archives merged, and in 2006 the collections passed fully under the federal Akademie der Künste.

Collections and Holdings

The Archives today hold over 1,400 individual archives of artists across all sectors of the arts, including holdings from 54 institutions and associations, and 75 themed collections. Physical holdings include approximately 14,000 linear metres of unique archival materials, around 1,500,000 photographs, a library of 650,000 media items, 25,000 sheets of stage and theatre graphic works, 450,000 building plans, 45,000 analogue media items, more than 130,000 digital audio and video files, 53,000 art works (primarily works on paper), and approximately 50,000 posters. The Historical Archives alone comprises 1,200 linear metres of files, around 260 linear metres of press cuttings, and approximately 125,000 photographs. The Archives also incorporate the Brecht-Weigel Museum and the Anna Seghers Museum.

Notable Collections Relevant to Journalism and Media

The Film and Media Arts department holds significant materials on German film and broadcast history, and the archives document the cultural infrastructure around mass media including newspapers and periodicals. The Media Archives manages audio-visual collections. Cross-disciplinary collecting focuses include art and culture in the GDR, archives of artists' associations, exile during the Nazi period (with 320 individual collections including figures such as Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, and John Heartfield), and art and culture in Berlin and Germany since 1900. Press cuttings collections and institutional records documenting public discourse on the arts constitute an important resource for researchers in media history.

Access and Usage

The Archives database, launched in December 2015 and regularly updated, provides online access to information on all collections and contains around 1,020,000 archival records and approximately 462,000 analogue and digital copies of archival materials. Research in the Archives is free of charge for scholarly, private, or press purposes. Reading rooms are available on-site. Due to copyright and personal rights restrictions, only a portion of digitised materials can be viewed online. The database offers archives search, free text search, and media search functions.