The holdings

The Historical Archive (which is the Academy’s institutional archive), the art collection and the library go back to the beginning of the Prussian Academy of Arts, founded in 1696. The two Berlin post-war academies in East and West began, in 1950 and 1956 respectively, to collect archives referring to individual persons (documentary remainsestates of individuals). These run back to the end of the nineteenth century. In 1993 the merger of the two academies led also to the merger of the archives from East and West. Since 2005 the Federal German Government has been the patron of the Academy of Arts and its Archive.

The Archive currently maintains around 1,100 individual holdings, tied to provenance, which are managed under the name of the individual whose source material they are (in a few cases also as thematic collections). Each individual holding is allocated to one of the Archive’s divisions: visual arts, architecture, music, literature, performing arts, film and media; to these must be added the Historical Archive, the Art Collection and the Library. The entire holdings cover some 12,000 continuous metres of shelving, most of these documents being unique, 25,000 large-format pages of theatrical graphic design, 55,000 building plans and 1,200,000 photographs. Moreover the Art Collection contains 60,000 items and a collection of 40,000 artistic posters. The Library comprises 550,000 holding items.

The main cross-disciplinary collections are:

• The history of the Berlin Academy of Arts since 1696
• Artists and cultural life in Berlin and Germany since 1900
• Emigration of artists during the National Socialist period
• The Jewish Cultural Association in Germany (1933-41)
• Art and culture in the GDR
• Archives of artists’ associations and clubs.

Further reading:
> The artists’ archives of the Academy − a history of its acquisitions (german)