Does a History Research Institute Need Its Own Archive?

At the beginning of the 1980s, a group of West German social scientists, historians, political scientists, biologists, psychologists, and doctors gathered to initiate an interdisciplinary project on the history of health and social policy during the global economic crisis and the Nazi dictatorship. The members of this group had played an active part in the extra-parliamentary movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as making a contribution, albeit a late one, to overcoming the authoritarian post-Nazi structures in West Germany and West Berlin. At this point they took up positions as publicists, scientists, doctors, teachers, and psychotherapists in central areas of social life, endeavoring to gain acceptance in their everyday professional work for their alternative ideas. To this end it was deemed useful to carry out an exhaustive and interdisciplinary analysis of the old encrusted structures in their various professions. To coordinate their activities, they first founded a society, the Verein zur Erforschung der Ns-Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik, and set up a documentation site, called Dokumentationsstelle zur ns-Sozialpolitik. ¹ A few years later they came into contact with a critically-minded sponsor, who was willing to give the initiative generous support. Since the middle of the 80s, in the shortest possible time, a research institute was developed, dedicated to the multidisciplinary historical analysis of the first half of the twentieth century. The leading representatives of some established institutions of a similar kind – for instance, the Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung – were not so happy to feel this fresh wind from northern Germany, but a substantial minority of their staffs enjoyed it.