New digital archive: Jewish literature from Berlin 1933-1945 unfolds!

New digital archive: Jewish literature from Berlin 1933-1945 unfolds!

On June 30, 2025, the opening of the Digital Archive of Jewish Authors in Berlin 1933–1945 (DAjAB) will be announced, which will be initiated next Monday, July 7th at 4:00 p.m., with an online presentation and a conversation. This important archive, led by Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schoor, offers access to over 1,000 Jewish writers who lived and worked in Berlin during the Nazi era. The project represents a comprehensive documentation of the persecution of these authors and aims to make their literary work accessible to a broad public.

The digital archive will be accessible via a special platform from July 7th at 6:00 p.m. The project received financial support from the German Research Foundation (DFG) over a period of six years, supplemented by the Friede Springer Foundation and the Alfred Landecker Foundation. Around a million pieces of information are stored in this extensive online portal, including biographical data, previously unprinted books, articles from newspapers and magazines, and secondary literature.

Scope and contents of the archive

The DAjAB includes over 4,000 digitized works, original documents, legacy materials, photographs and interviews. Furthermore, more than 1,000 cultural events, activities of around 2,200 organizations and almost 2,800 places of Jewish life in Berlin and the surrounding area are documented. Thanks to the integrated search function, a semantic full-text search is possible in the digitized objects, which significantly improves research options within the holdings and on international institutions and archives.

The initiative to create this multimedia archive is led by the Axel Springer Endowed Professorship for German-Jewish Literary and Cultural History, Exile and Migration at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). The aim of the project is to document the persecution of Jewish authors during National Socialism and to contribute to basic research in cultural and literary history. The DAjAB thus represents a bridge between archive, library and research and teaching platform.

Involved in initiation

The digital archive is part of an institutionalized network that includes several important institutions: the university library of the European University Viadrina, the Information, Communication and Multimedia Center (IKMZ), the university library of the Free University of Berlin, the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg and the archive of the Jewish Museum Berlin. The partners are helping to collect around 1,200 bio-bibliographies of Jewish authors who lived in Berlin after 1933.

In summary, the DAjAB offers a valuable resource for research and the public by providing rare primary texts, original documents and audiovisual materials and thus actively contributes to research on the literature of exile, internal emigration and Nazi literature. The online presentation on July 7th not only represents the official launch of the archive, but also a first step towards bringing the works and voices of the persecuted Jewish authors into social discourse. Further information about the opening event and access to the archive can be found in the respective announcements from the European University Viadrina and the participating institutions.