Suchergebnisse

A persistent rumor has it that the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis/International Institute for Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, does not intend to continue publishing its series of documentation of central elements of its archives. Editions of this kind are extremely work-intensive and time-consuming, and the institution can no longer afford to finance it. This is what is at the core of the rumor: the IISG has to find money from outside funds in order to finance these editions, but entertains no plans to discontinue the publication of these central sources. If this rumor were true, however, it would be highly deplorable, something which the present volume amply substantiates.

From 1954 to 1985, Inge Lammel was the director of the Arbeiterliedarchiev (Labour and Working-Class Songs) at the Academy of the Arts in Berlin. Throughout its life, the Archive remained a small institution with few resources, but in the course of the thirty-five years leading up to 1990, it had collected considerable volumes of printed and unprinted material, scores, songbooks, memoirs, (long before "oral history" had been recognised as a special type of material), gramophone records, tapes, etc.—an effort led by Inge Lammel from the time when the Archive was first established. In 1990, the Archive was more or less closed down, despite the fact that at the time it was the centre of vigorous research activities, not just in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), but also in the Federal Republic of Germany. This component of research into labor and working-class evolution has now largely been discontinued; one of the aims behind this publication is to provide any emerging renewed interest with a point of departure.