German Studies: Databases

Weimar and Nazi Germany

A major collection offering researchers previously unavailable classified resources to significantly enhance their understanding of early 20th-century Europe and the rise of Nazism and fascism. Based on the most widely used of the Foreign Office files at the National Archives, the archive includes nearly 600,000 pages of declassified, exclusive, previously undigitized files sent to the UK Foreign Office from embassies, covert contacts, and other sources.  In doing so the database documents a tumultuous period of hyperinflation, political extremism, and seizures of power, providing contemporaneous accounts, documents, reports, and correspondence of how Western democracies struggled with fascism and autocracy. In particular, the consular reports give indispensable first-hand accounts of culture, society and everyday life in Weimar and Nazi Germany and, as these are in English, they offer a particular useful reserve of primary sources for first time researchers and students undertaking extended projects and long essays, whilst complementing the Library’s existing German language holdings covering this period, most notably, Klemperer online: Tagebücher 1918-1959. Parallel political developments in Spain and Italy are also addressed.  In addition to traditional disciplines such as German and History, interdisciplinary research clusters such as the Cultural History of War should also benefit from this new acquisition

The hosting platform (History Commons) offers a simple and streamlined but highly functional interface. At the top of the home page are facets for documents, topics, lists, and modules, as well as an option for uploading individualized content that users can create (and share) from the archive. Nine language options are available, and each document has an informative contents summary and detailed subject indexing. Text and data mining are also allowed.

Klemperer online: Tagebücher 1918-1959

Database offering the complete and unabridged diaries of Victor Klemperer, which are among the most important sources of 20th century German history. The texts feature an extensive commentary and contain over a third more material than the print editions which were bestsellers at the time of their publication. The diaries encompass four decades (from 1918 to 1959) and provide a unique testimony from a leading German-Jewish intellectual illuminating three landmark regimes (the Weimar Republic, the National Socialist era, and the German Democratic Republic). In addition to an edited transcript, the database provides a facsimile of each hand-written diary entry with an intuitive tab structure ensuring easy navigation between the transcript and the handwritten originals.  Reformulation as a database also allow individual elements and thematic strands to be isolated to further facilitate research. These not only include Klemperer’s professional life as an academic, but more surprising activities such as his detailed critical notes on 750 films, which are now newly accompanied by a separate filmography.

MLA International Bibliography

Produced by the Modern Language Association The MLA International Bibliography is the definitive index for the study of language, literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition, folklore, and film, covering scholarly publications from the early 20th century to the present. International in scope, it includes citations to journal articles, books, articles in books, series, translations, scholarly editions, websites, and dissertations, with links to full text in JSTOR, Project MUSE, and other resources. The database also includes the MLA Directory of Periodicals and the MLA Thesaurus, a proprietary, searchable collection of thousands of subject terms, and personal names used in indexing the bibliography (Provided by Publisher).