Munich State Archives

Organizational Chart

The State Archive Munich is the state authority responsible for all questions of archives in the administrative district of Oberbayern. As a historical detonator, he is in the Duchy between 1507 and 1799/1803. Kurfürstentum Bayern existing pensioner offices Munich and Burghausen (before 1779 including the Innviertel), the districts located in today's Upper Bavaria (since 1808) and the temporarily Bavarian areas of Tyrol and Salzburg between 1805 and 1816 (Isarkreis 1808-1837, Salzachkreis 1808-1816, Innkreis 1808-1815 with provisional Landesgubernium Innsbruck 1805-1808, Eisack-1808 and The modern demolition is formed by the Upper Bavarian government district, built in 1837, in its current expansion, modified by the 1972 territorial reform. With regard to the document of the Notariate since 1862 he has embraced the territory of the Oberlandesgericht Munich (Oberbayern, Niederbayern with the exception of the local courts Kelheim and Straubing, Schwaben).

At the time (December 31, 2008), the holdings of the State Archives comprise over 13.7 million archiving units in the amount of approx. 40,000 running meters (lfm), including around 7,900 documents, 8,7 million notariat certificates, over 4.5 million official books and files, as well as 85,000 cards and plans. The modern stocks are continuously supplemented by the levies of authorities, courts, notaries and other public bodies of the Free State of Bavaria in the field of competence.

The use depends on the usage order for the state archives of Bavaria of 16th. January 1990 (GVBl p. 6) in the valid version, in which the use fees are also regulated. Special arrangements exist for various individual stocks and deposits.

The State Archive Munich was created from the registrature of the Kurbayerische Hofkammer, which was continued by the Generallandesdirektion, built in 1799, and since 1803 by the Landesdirektion von Baiern and extended by documents of dissolved authorities. This so-called Old Bavarian Provincial or Retar Data Register was established in 1808 and was annexed to the Kgl. Bavarian General Reichsarchiv (now Bayerisches Hauptstaatarchiv) as the "Reichsarchiv-Conservatorium im Alten Hof zu Munich" in 1814. The archive conservatory finally comprised about 30 registratures of Kurbayerian central and central authorities since 1799, as well as the main mass of acts of the dissolved spiritual institutions of Altbayern. After the distinction between "archival" and "non-archival" documents used in Bavaria at the beginning of the 19th century, the Reich Archive received all "archival" documents, such as documents and more important official books. The archive conservatory in Landshut (now State Archive Landshut) was extended by its function as an accounting depot of the court chamber (since 1753) and the spiritual council (since 1799) to all the offices and church bills. The other "non-archival" documents of the historical court and state offices, including the files of the new Bavarian ministries and of the administrations of the temporarily Bavarian territories, were sent to the archive conservatory Munich as an old Bavarian file division of the Reichsarchiv. For reasons of space, many stocks were transferred to the Trausnitz in Landshut, so that the boundary between the present-day Bavarian Main State Archives and the state archives Landshut and Munich became completely unclear and the stock structures were finally missing any clarity. In addition, the archive conservatory increased the charges of the new Upper Bavarian courts and state authorities of the middle and lower administrative levels. They were partially archived in the form of mixed stocks formed in the archives, partly within the scope of levies (currently around 62,000 archiving units).

In 1892, the authority of the Alte Hof, which has been called "Kreisarchiv" since 1876, moved to the new service building on Himbselstraße. The integration carried out in 1921 as a department into the Bayerische Hauptstaatsarchiv and the transfer of the ministerial files to the tribal department of the Main State Archive, which had been completed until 1932, changed only little by the unsatisfactory inventory structure of the archive.

Thanks to timely outsourcing, the archive suffered hardly any losses during the Second World War. In 1960, the renaming took place in the State Archive for Upper Bavaria, in 1967 the move to the current service building. Finally, in 1971, the archive was removed from the Association of the Bavarian Main State Archives and, as an independent authority directly subordinated to the Directorate-General of the Bavarian State Archives, the other Bavarian State Archives under the name "Staatsarchiv München". Since 1978, the State Archive has an outpost on the Willibaldsburg above Eichstätt.

Due to the old Bavarian inventory cleaning of 1978, the state archive of Munich was also given permanent responsibility for the historical collections with the Bavarian Main State Archive and the State Archive Landshut.

The headquarters of the State Archives is the building tract of the former Bavarian Ministry of War, which was built in 1822 to 1830 according to plans by Leo von Klenzes, and which served the Minister of War as a residential building. The original impression of the classical building today only conveys the façade, since the construction destroyed during the Second World War was restored in 1965/67 primarily according to archive requirements.

In Eichstätt, service and magazine rooms are available in the Gemmingenbau of the former East German Willibaldsburg, which has been designed by Augsburger Elias Holl since 1609.

The task of the archives is to offer the sources entrusted to them in an external and internal order that meets the demands and demands of research. This can only be done on the basis of the principle of provenance which is generally recognized today, i.e. the historical order of the archivia according to its origin, which means that the written material grown in an institution, authority or private person is also left undivided in the archive in its context of origin or returned to it and, if possible, is designated by the name of the place of origin. Only through such an inventory formation are clearly defined, self-contained funds within which the document can be developed and made accessible by the competence of the registrature designer.

The historical development of the State Archive Munich illustrates that the application of this principle of order has made a substantial reorganization of older stocks necessary. Their logical consequence and at the same time a prerequisite was the unification of stocks of the same origin divided into different archives. In 1978, the collection was purged with the Bavarian Main State Archive and the State Archive Landshut on the historical-administrative basis of the Duchy/Kurfürstentum Bayern and the territorial basis of the modern administrative district of Oberbayern changed the stock structure of the State Archive Munich to a considerable extent and created clear boundaries between the Old Bavarian archives for the first time. Where can I find the document of a specific authority or institution that was concerned with the matter of interest to me? From the Old Bavarian File Department of the Reichsarchiv, a regional archive with clearly described explosives has been created, in which collection goods as well as archive goods of non-state origin, such as nobility and court-mark archives and archives of business companies, as well as foundations and public-law corporations, have a legitimate place.

The library contains approx. 40,000 volumes. Collective areas are in particular archives, source editions, regional history, legal history and official pages. A small free hand library is set up in the reading room.

Publications about the Munich State Archives can be found here. 

Here is the website of the Association for the Promotion of the State Archive Munich e.V..

You can find the virtual tour of the State Archives here: Start tour