The Historial Archive with Rhenish Picture Archive (; until January 2023, Historical Archive of the City of Cologne: , or for short) is the municipal archive of Cologne, Germany. It ranks among the largest communal archives in Europe.
A municipal archive has existed in Cologne since the Middle Ages. The oldest inventory of charters in the archive is dated 1408–1409. The oldest document kept in the archive is a charter dated .
The archive contains official records and private documents from all ages of Cologne history, as well as an extensive library of manuscripts. While the adjective historical in its name might suggest a closed, complete archive with a focus on older history, the archive is also the official government repository responsible for collecting recent municipal records.
The six-storey archive building collapsed on 3 March 2009, along with two neighbouring apartment buildings. Two residents of these buildings were found dead. All archive staff and visitors survived, as they were able to escape upon a warning by construction workers. Around 90% of archival records were buried by the collapse, although it subsequently proved possible to rescue and repair many of them.
Construction work on a new archive began in 2014, and the new archive opened on 3 September 2021. At that time, a spokesperson for the archive estimated that restoration work will require more than 200 persons to work continuously for thirty years.
In January 2023, the archive merged with the Rhenish Picture Archive (), a collection of photographs on the history of art, architecture, culture, and photography in Cologne and the Rhineland, now housed in the same building: from this date the joint institution adopted its current name.
Legal basis The work of communal archives in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia is based on the bill of 1989. The municipal archive of Cologne is also governed by the municipal archive ordinance , last revised in 2007. The federal bill does not apply.
History Shrine system An early programme of holding archival records in Cologne was the so-called shrine system (), used for documenting citizens' rights. A shrine (, from ) was a wooden chest or cabinet where parish administrations stored records and charters. Such shrines were used for records storage throughout the Middle Ages and into early modern times, most notably in the parish of St. Lawrence near the Cologne town hall. The records were for the most part those of real estate transactions: these were recorded on sheets of parchment or in books, which subsequently became known as shrine books (). In Cologne, these books can be traced back to . Similar books from the late 12th century are known from the cities of Metz and Andernach.W. Herborn, Schreinswesen. In the 19th century, all records of the old Cologne shrine quarters were transferred to the municipal archives.
Early history
Important documents relating to the city of Cologne and its citizens have been archived since the Middle Ages. As late as 1322, these could still be stored in a single chest in the home of a patrician. In 1326 the city council decided to compile the so-called "White Book" (), a finding aid comprising copies of charters and privileges. By 1370 the archives were located in the .
As the city and its national and international trade thrived and prospered, the municipal administration began to plan further storage to house the growing number of documents in an adequate space. On 19 August 1406, the city council resolved to add a tower to the town hall. The tower was built between 1407 and 1414, and served, among other purposes, as a storage room for municipal charters, privileges, and securities. Cologne's bursary officer, Roland von Odendorp, was responsible for its construction. The Gothic building with its two tetragonal upper stories and two more octagonal top stories has some similarities to Dutch belfries of the time and rises to . It contained a wine cellar, an armory, a meeting room for the municipal council, a firefighter guardroom on the very top, and a vaulted room for the municipal archives. Documents were stored in chests or cabinets marked A to X. The charter, a municipal constitution document of 1396, was granted pride of place in a chest decorated with a crown. After 1414, the archive was directed by a vault master (). Its management was later taken over by a committee of municipal jurists, the .Bettina Schmidt-Czaia und Ulrich S. Soénius (Hrsg.): Gedächtnisort. Das Historische Archiv der Stadt Köln, Böhlau Verlag, Köln 2010, . p. 11ffHiltrud Kier, Bernd Ernsting, Ulrich Krings, Stadt Köln (Hrsg.): Köln, der Ratsturm: seine Geschichte und sein Figurenprogramm. J.P. Bachem Verlag, Köln 1996, .
In 1594, the records of the Bruges offices of the Hanseatic League (then stored in Antwerp) were transferred to the Cologne archives. These records included copies of the protocols of the diets of the Hanseatic League.Joachim Deeters: Hansische Rezesse. Eine quellenkundliche Untersuchung anhand der Überlieferung im Historischen Archiv der Stadt Köln. in: Hammel-Kiesow (ed.): Das Gedächtnis der Hansestadt Lübeck, Lübeck : Schmidt-Römhild 2005, p. 427-446 (429), With the 1594 transfer, the Cologne archive became the most important repository of historical material concerning the Hanseatic League and thus concerning the history of Northern Germany in general, matched only by the municipal archives of Lübeck.
On 27 February 1602, the city council ordered that books on jurisdiction and administration were to be systematically bought at the regularly held Frankfurt Book Fair. These were subsequently stored in the municipal archive and became the basis of the Cologne municipal library.
After the secularization of abbeys and colleges of canons in Cologne in the early years of the 19th century, the French government ordered their archives to be stored in the state archives in Düsseldorf. It was not until 1949 that a mayor of Cologne succeeded in recovering 19,000 charters and many other records for the Cologne municipal archives.
Acquisitions in the 19th century
In 1818, the city of Cologne was bequeathed Ferdinand Franz Wallraf's major collection of art, books, and manuscripts. After Wallraf's death in 1824, his collection of statues and paintings became the basis of the , now known as the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, one of Cologne's major art museums. The archive and library, at that time still run as a single entity, were chosen to hold all books and manuscripts. When the institutions were administratively separated in the 1880s, all manuscripts were retained by the archive, while all printed books were given to the library. This is why, unlike many other archives, the Cologne archive boasts a major collection of medieval manuscripts. Both archive and library shared a building until 1934, when the library moved to the newly built building of the University of Cologne.
From 1815 until he died in 1857, Johann Jakob Peter Fuchs managed the municipal archive as its honorary director. Fuchs was a friend of Wallraf's who also supervised the incorporation and cataloging of the Wallraf collection in 1824. He reorganized the entire archive and made its contents accessible to scholarly research.Die Chronik Kölns, S. 252.
In 1857, Leonhard Ennen became the first full-time municipal archivist. Among other material, he acquired documents from the estate of Hermann von Weinsberg, a 16th-century Cologne jurist famous for his autobiographical writings.
Archive building of 1897
A new purpose-built structure to house the municipal archive and library was erected between 1894 and 1897 to a Gothic revival design by Friedrich Carl Heimann; it was inaugurated in December 1897.Die Chronik Kölns, S. 289. The new building was large enough to accommodate the archive at a time of accelerated growth when the city of Cologne was absorbing many previously independent towns and villages.
During World War II the building suffered damage from bombing. However, since all records and manuscripts had been moved into secure storage as early as September 1939, the archive did not suffer any substantial loss.
After the archive moved to its new location in 1971, the 1897 building has been used as a private library by Gerling, a large insurance company.
Archive building of 1971
In 1971, a six-storey archive building by architect Fritz Haferkamp was built at in the southern part of Cologne's city centre.
An underlying principle of the design was to protect archival records from fluctuations in weather and climate while creating a balanced room climate. In a move away from the contemporary popularity of electromechanical air conditioning, Haferkamp preferred a structural-physical, self-regulating solution that needed only little additional climate technology. As the Cologne Model, the building became a model for many later archive buildings internationally.
For maximum protection of the stack rooms against atmospheric exposure, an armored concrete frame was encased by a brick wall with a thickness of . A facade was attached at a distance of from the brick wall, made from bright Czech granite. The interior walls were plastered with lime mortar that absorbed air moisture from the inside. The moisture diffused through the brick wall and was drained through the space between the wall and the facade.Wolfgang Hans Stein: Fragen der Anwendung des Kölner Modells im Archivbau. In: Der Archivar 45 (1992) col. 416 Only the basement rooms (located under a ceiling with a thickness of ) were artificially air-conditioned. Vertical light slots with a height of and a width of allowed only diffused light to pass to the interior wall, to prevent sunlight from causing any change in temperature. Only the ground floor was equipped with larger windows. The slots were also used for ventilation: opposing slots caused a stream of air that moved exactly parallel to the shelf rows. Each storey of the stacks building had a linear capacity of of records on of effective surface. Rooms were high, shelves rose to . Each shelf had a carrying capacity of .Hugo Stehkämper: Neubau des historischen Archivs der Stadt Köln.
The dominating stacks building was high, wide, and deep, while the ground floor and basement of the complex were considerably larger. Towards , the ground floor consisted of the main entrance hall and an exhibition room. Adjacent were the reading room, approximately 20 office rooms, the restoration workshop, and various functional rooms. Four courtyards provided natural light to the rear ground floor rooms. The basement included the charters archive, the archival library, and, in its centre, a treasure bunker for charters and records walled by armoured concrete. The building was secured by fire detectors, a carbon-dioxide-based fire-extinguishing system, and a burglar alarm device.
After the archive had moved from the 1897 building to its new home between 26 April and 20 June 1971, a little under 44% of the total capacity was in use. The building was planned to have sufficient capacity for 30 years of growth, but maximum capacity was reached in 1996 which led to the outsourcing of some records.Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 March 2009, p. 31
Collapse of the archive in 2009
On 3 March 2009 at 1:58pm, the archive building collapsed. Public prosecutors in 2017 confirmed that the construction of a new underground railway line of the Cologne Stadtbahn system had been the cause. Construction workers building an underground switch facility noticed that water was flooding into the building pit. They rapidly warned staff and visitors of the archive, who were instructed to evacuate the building. Shortly afterwards, an underground landslide into the subway tunnel caused the archive building to collapse.Mit großem Besteck; Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 6 March 2009, p. 2 Two adjacent apartment buildings also collapsed, killing two residents.