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The little town of Emmendingen near Freiburg hosts an astonishing archive: the „Deutsche Tagebucharchiv“ which collects diaries from „ordinary“ people below the Marbach threshold. Colleagues working on modern ego-documents are probably familiar with this but I was taken by surprise by the sheer scope of this enterprise. They receive well over 300 new lots annually, some of them large runs of diaries. The database of 15.000 diaries (and counting) is searchable for topics as well as for years:

http://tagebucharchiv.de/recherche/online-katalog/

More sensitive information (real names, dates, confidential information) is held in an internal database which can be consulted via the archivists. This is obviously useful for a host of research questions from historical approaches to contemporary culture. Last year, they did „Verborgene Chronik“, an impressive documentary accompanied by an audiobook of how a large sample of diarists - from teenagers to officers - experienced the beginning of WW1. Finally, they also take students on work placements - certainly a good way to spend a YA...

Henrike Lähnemann

Professor of Medieval German * Postal address:  St Edmund Hall |Queen’s Lane |GB – OX1 4AR Oxford * Medingen website http://medingen.seh.ox.ac.uk/ @HLaehnemann

Until 29 August 2015: Senior Research Fellow, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies FRIAS
Albertstr. 19 Office 02 022 | D - 79104 Freiburg | 0049 761 203-97363