Augsburg City Archives
The Augsburg City Archives are the central point of contact for research on the history of the city of Augsburg. As the memory of the city and its administration, the Archives preserve all important official records of today’s municipal administration and its predecessors. This body of records (currently around 18,000 linear meters, reaching back to the 11th century) is complemented by extensive collections of various types and origins relating to the city of Augsburg and can be consulted in the reading room.
The Augsburg City Archives preserve the records of all departments of the Augsburg municipal administration, as well as those of other institutions, companies, associations, and private individuals that are significant for the history of the city of Augsburg. In addition, the Archives complement this body of records by actively collecting flyers, brochures, photographs, maps and plans, and much more.
The archived materials are accessible to all interested persons, either in analog or digital form. The team of the City Archives is happy to provide advice and support with research inquiries. It does not matter whether the topics are academic or related to local history, whether someone wishes to explore their own family history, or whether information is needed for educational or journalistic work.
As part of its public outreach and its work in historical and political education, the City Archives offers a wide range of public events through its annual program. Introductory sessions on archival work for school classes and university seminars are also possible at any time.
The City Archives at its location at Zur Kammgarnspinnerei 11.
With the rise of humanist interest in the early sixteenth century, the City of Augsburg began efforts to bring its archives into a systematic and orderly condition. In 1541, the first documented commission was entrusted to the municipal servant Clemens Jäger to arrange and organize the archival records. The Chancery Ordinance issued by the town clerk Georg Frölich in 1543 laid the foundation for the development of a separate chancery archive, which evolved by the mid-seventeenth century into the core repository of the city council's records and thus became the nucleus of the municipal archives. Alongside this archive, the Stadtpflegergewölbe (“City Treasurers’ Vault”) in the Town Hall served from the late sixteenth century onward as the principal selection archive of the Imperial City, where especially important documents were preserved.
The Peace of Westphalia brought about a significant change in 1648. The parity-based allocation of municipal offices between the confessions was accompanied by a division of the records management system, which remained in effect until 1806. In addition to the jointly administered central archives, which held the charters and administrative registers of the municipal registries, the Protestant Administrative Archive (Evangelisches Wesensarchiv) was established in 1712 and the Catholic Administrative Archive (Katholisches Wesensarchiv) in 1757 to house the files of the Protestant and Catholic sections of the city council respectively.
Following the mediatisation of the Imperial City of Augsburg and its incorporation into the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1806, not the entire archive of the former Imperial City but only those records of legal significance—namely charters, administrative registers, and files of Imperial City provenance—were transferred to the then Reichsarchiv (Imperial Archives) in Munich. Today, 1,690 charters and approximately 45 linear metres of files and administrative registers are preserved in the Augsburg State Archives (Staatsarchiv Augsburg), which is responsible for the territories and institutions of the Swabian Imperial Circle and the Austrian Further Austria territories that passed to Bavaria.
From 1885, the Augsburg City Archives was housed in its first purpose-built archival facility. Unlike many other archives of former Imperial Free Cities, its holdings comprised extensive series of administrative registers and files of great significance for research into the history of both the city and the region. The building, formerly part of the Lotzbeck tobacco factory, was situated on the outskirts of the present-day Stadtmarkt at 12 Fuggerstraße.
Due to a lack of space and a pest infestation, the Augsburg City Archives moved into the building of the former Augsburg worsted spinning mill (Kammgarnspinnerei). At this new location, it opened in 2016 and has since benefited from optimal storage conditions for its archival materials as well as excellent research facilities in its modern reading room.