Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe

The Herder Institute supports a wide range of scientific activities on the historical and cultural development of East Central Europe through its research, knowledge transfer, documentation and digitalization departments. The focus of interest is on Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia as well as the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. An important concern is the joint exploration of the interrelation of this core region with its neighbors (above all Germany, Austria, Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia) in a comparative pan-European context. For several years now, the Digital Humanities have been a major focus of the institute’s work, both in the area of digital and social infrastructure development as well as in research and career development.

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The unique collections consist of a research library on the history and culture of East Central Europe, which now contains more than half a million media units, including a music collection, a samizdat collection and a press collection. Daily and weekly newspapers from East Central Europe have been archived since 1952 and have been evaluated for the period up to 1999 in a systematic collection of more than 5 million clippings. In addition, the Institute also has one of the best image archives with image carriers of all kinds, especially on the art and cultural history of East Central Europe (currently about 700,000 units), a map collection with about 45,000 map sheets, about 1,200 old maps and slightly more than 6,300 aerial photographs from the years between 1942 and 1945. Finally, the document collection focuses on the history of the Baltic
States and continuously collects estates, family archives, individual archival documents as well as photographed archival records (about 1,300 running meters of shelving). The materials held in stock are the starting point for our own research, close cooperation with the two universities in Giessen and Marburg in research and teaching, and close networking with numerous other Leibniz institutions (Leibniz Research Associations).

Current project-leading perspectives

Collecting, preserving, indexing and communicating
Visual history and art history
Reflection and design of digital change
Space – City – Environment
Political orders – conflict – security