Sonderband 2. International Council on Archives. Dritte Europäische Archivkonferenz, Wien 11. bis 15. Mai 1993. Tagungsprotokolle (1996)

3. Session / Séance. Sharing of Experience and Exchange of Staff / Partage d’Expériences et Echange des Personnes - Oldenhage, Klaus: Scope and Aims of Mobility. A German View / Portée et buts de la mobilité. Un point de vue allemand (english 279 - français 285)

3. Session/Séance: Oldenhage, Scope and Aims of Mobility. A German view

Although the German colonial records were not administered by the Federal Republic of Germany before reunification in 1990, the Federal German Government and the German archival community agreed on the need to train for many months archivists in particular from Cameroons, Tanzania and Togo, not only in archival theory and practice but also in the German language. On the other hand, several German archivists went to these and other countries for a longer period up to more than one year to prepare microfilming and to give professional advice.

Both Germanies and the united country never felt that the archival relations to developing countries should concentrate on colonial records only. Training possibilities - I should like to particularly mention the summer school of the State Film Archives of the GDR - were open to many developing countries, but depended on the ability of the trainees to communicate in German, unless training courses in technical subjects related to archives could be offered in English or French. Technical assistance was granted more than once after an exchange of staff. In this respect, I personally recall the examples of film archives in Brazil, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Frankly speaking, I should honestly mention that we often could not meet the needs of our partners not only for money reasons: sometimes because of our colleagues’ insufficiant ability to speak German, but most of the time because of the lack of German experiences in the archival and administrative tradition of the other country.

6. Legal problems and European matters

My stay of more than five months with the United States National Archives made me familiar with an archival legal system of a country with an outstanding democratic tradition. Not only the legal problems concerning the occupational records in the framework of the OMGUS project, but even more the political discussion of the transfer of the US Berlin Document Center containing person-related information on Nazi party members and other Germans into German custody lead to comparative studies on the archival and legal system of the both countries.

German archivists had the chance to apply the American principles of freedom of information and privacy to the first archival legislation in German history which was initiated in the late seventies. The most moving sentence I have ever heard in my professional life was said by our American colleague Robert Wolfe in 1978 aiming at a fair compromise between the citizens’ right to get information about governments’ activities and the human right of privacy: „It is at least an open question whether those who lost a war also lost their right to privacy.“ I gladly add that the study of Swedish and Norwegian press legislation, discussions with Canadian and Dutch colleagues and studies of the French law of 1979 also enabled me to argue with and to convince the enemies of any archival legislation in Germany: our conservative lawyers.

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