The IISH recently marked the hundredth digitized archive in its annals thanks to two ambitious digitization programs, namely the 'Central' and 'Metamorfoze'.
This concerns an extensive archive of European scope, in which correspondence of all the leaders of the international labour movement is to be found: the editorial archive of Sozialistische Monatshefte. The history of this archive, which covers the period 1897-1933, is a story of its own.
The archive came in 1939 in the possession of the IISH with the support of the Centrale Workers' Insurance and Deposit Bank (Centrale) for the price of 50 000 French francs. It was housed in the IISH’ Paris office. It was removed eastward in 1940 by the Germans, who thought they would to be able to extract useful information from it. After in 1945 the archives were found in Eastern Europe by the Russian armies, who in turn confiscated them. The archive was subsequently hidden for fifty years in a warehouse in Moscow. The depot was discovered in 1991, and it took years of negotiations before the Russians finally returned the archives. On 11 April 2002, ‘Fond 591 Joseph Bloch’- Bloch was editorial secretary of the magazine – came home to its Amsterdam base. But still one file was missing. The Bundesarchiv in Berlin once laid its hands on a dossier containing correspondence from 'very important persons' (‘autograph collection’) with the editorial secretary of SM.
Heinrich and Thomas Mann and Rosa Luxemburg corresponded with Sozialistische Monatshefte
Finally, this file too ended up in Amsterdam, and in itts digized form, the SM archive can now be accessed in Berlin, Moscow or any other place.
More about the archive Sozialistische Monatshefte
- About letters from Rosa Luxemburg in the SM archive
- Inventory of the Sozialistische Monatshefte Archive
- About the 'Centrale' project
- Website of Metamorfoze