Archive of social movements in Freiburg

Das Freiburger Archiv Soziale Bewegungen e.V. was founded in 1985. The collections are impressive – there is only a portion of the storage space on site, and  digitization began here very early. Selected topics and documents are published digitally in the ‘Materials on Protest History’ series.

Locality is of great importance here; Freiburg is an important alternative milieu, one of the cradles of German punk, an important site of the squat movement. The archive itself is located on land bought from the city by the local squatters’ movement, and a lot of projects are carried out for the benefit of the activist community (from a variety of political topics, except the extreme right, of course).

We talk to the head of the archive, Michael Koltan, who is a computer scientist by training, among other things, about the software and his proprietary database for searching chronologies of events. A phrase entered in the database returns a result in the form of a timeline of documents, which helps in researching the history of protest campaigns.

Read more about the collections and history of the archive in Freiburg: http://www.archivsozialebewegungen.de