archivfuehrer-kolonialzeit.de

The project focuses on exploring Germany's colonial past and its extensive archival impact. Established in 2017 in collaboration with the Federal Foreign Office, it aims to consolidate historical traces left in various archives and connect them with relevant locations, actors, and events. The initiative highlights how Germany's colonial pursuits from 1884 significantly influenced societies in conquered territories, contributing to their integration into global markets and the establishment of administrative structures.

The project offers a freely accessible online portal that features a database containing over 85,000 entries from around 450 institutions. Users can navigate documentation descriptions, access translated resources in multiple languages, and utilize tools like historical maps of German colonies with geographical coordinates of more than 220,000 places. Additionally, it provides metadata, full text options, and a thesaurus utilizing data from Wikidata to enhance collaborative efforts exploring underrepresented figures and events in colonial history. Overall, this project endeavors to present a comprehensive overview of German colonial archival materials, acknowledging the complexities of this historical narrative.