Audio-visual holdings

In addition to written documents, such as minutes, reports, letters and deeds, the State Archive also preserves a wide range of graphical materials, such as photographs, plans, postcards, posters and audio and film material.

The audio-visual archive division contains photographic bequests, albums, postcards and individual images of places and people. In addition, visual material may also be found in company archives, club or association archives, personal bequests or administrative holdings. The images are preserved on various carriers (negatives, positives, slides, glass plates), in black-and-white or colour. Films and sound recordings are also kept in the audio-visual holdings division.

The online inventory can be searched specifically for photographic material. To do this, you should select the full-text search and click on «Display further search options». In the lower part of the form that you now see, you can restrict the type of archive material to «Bild» (image). This will result in all the relevant photographic holdings being displayed, most of which are digitised. Digitised images can be opened by clicking on the «Bildliste» (list of images) in the hit list.

You can view non-digital images in the reading room at the Archive offices and order reproductions if you wish.

The maps and plans are listed in the Plan Archive (Planarchiv) section. Please read the instructions provided there. Many of the analogue plans that are available can be viewed in digitised form in the online inventory.

We greatly appreciate receiving more precise information about an image whose details are currently rather imprecise. Additional details about the title (content), place and period are especially welcome. Send us any missing information about images along with the precise reference number and/or the URL for the unit of description.