20th Century Press Archives

During the entire 20th century, the press archives now held at the German National Library of Economics (ZBW) - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics have compiled more than 20 million documents, mostly press clippings about individual persons, companies and other corporate bodies, products and a wide variety of economics-related topics. The first articles go back to the 19th century; the last were selected and indexed in 2005. These holdings provide a unique basis from which to study German and international (economic) history of the 20th century from a German perspective.

The historic press archives of the Hamburgisches Welt-Wirtschafts-Archiv (Institute of International Economics) and the Wirtschaftsarchiv des Instituts für Weltwirtschaft in Kiel (Economic Archives of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy) for the years until the currency reform of 1948 or rather the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 were digitised during a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The digitised material, sourced mostly from roll film, is being gradually prepared for publication.

At present, we can provide online access to 250,000 documents relating to persons and companies. Other material which is not yet digitally available or subject to intellectual property rights restrictions, can be used for academic purposes on the premises of the ZBW in microform. Please contact the Information desk in Hamburg, Phone +49-40-42834-219 or by mail.

This website aims for making the content availible as Linked Open Data by embedding it as RDFa into the web pages. Since the base data is as of 2014, some links to the document images are dysfunct now. Please use the "view in production" link in the folder view. Feedback is very much appreciated by Joachim Neubert.

The active (German only) application resulting from the DFG-funded project can be found at https://pm20.zbw.eu/. For further information on the application or the dossiers please contact pressemappe20@zbw.eu.