The cataloguing of archive material is, needless to say, one of the most important tasks of any archive. Since the Cultural Center of East Prussia, in addition to many other valuables, also holds the archives of the Homeland Association of East Prussia, a new home was naturally offered to the archives of several East Prussian district and town communities, the care of which could no longer be guaranteed. A project financed by federal and in-house funds was undertaken to reorganize and digitally index these archives in order to make them accessible to the public and to make future scholarly research possible.
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After 1948, approximately 40 district and town communities were established in the Federal Republic under the auspices of the Homeland Association of East Prussia. For the expelled Germans, these institutions were of outmost importance for their memory culture and representation in general. Their primary task was, therefore, to collect East Prussian written and cultural heritage and to record and archive the history of their respective rural or urban district, its communities, and its population. A significant amount of cultural goods of all kinds were collected in this manner in the decades following the displacement. When the archives of four East Prussian town and district communities (the town community of Königsberg from Duisbur, the home district community of Königsberg from Minden, the district community of Johannisburg from Schleswig, and the town community of Tilsit from Kiel) were moved to the Cultural Center of East Prussia after their previous locations were abandoned, it became possible to envision a project with the goal of organizing the four collections, indexing them, and making them accessible to the public. During one year, more than 25 meters of archival records were reviewed, sorted, repackaged, and saved in a database, comprising a total of 232 archive boxes with 1,101 units. These include archival materials of different types: a variety of documents and visual media, special collections on cultural and school activities, as well as memories and reports from the war and post-war years. Special collections, for example, on the Königsberg schools, or the personal legacies of prominent people such as the music critic and composer Otto Besch or the composer Hugo Hartung are also included. The database will soon be made accessible online for use in all future research after the digital preparation of the data is finished and some additional questions are clarified. For the time being, inquiries can be made by mail at: archiv@kulturzentrum-ostpreussen.de.
