Since its foundation, the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF) has conducted numerous interviews as part of its research projects, providing information on biographies, special events, social conditions and working relationships. One focus of the ever-growing collection is on narrative, biographical interviews about the GDR past.

The interviews include not only memories of the past, but also the research interests of the researchers and the social situation at the time of the interview. The interviews therefore provide an insight into the memory of historical events and living conditions on the one hand, and on the other hand they form a wealth of knowledge about contemporary history and the historiography of recent decades.

The interviews are preserved in the ZZF's oral history collection and made available for contemporary historical research after legal evaluation. To this end, the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam is cooperating with the »Oral-History.Digital«-Project to develop a joint infrastructure for the storage and research of oral history interviews. In order to integrate oral history-specific research data into a national and international research data infrastructure, the ZZF is participating in the NFDI4Memory consortium, which aims to establish a corresponding infrastructure for the historical sciences.

The collection is currently under construction. The first ZZF holdings in the Oral-History.Digital interview portal are:

• Brückenbauer und Grenzgänger. Zeitgeschichte des Eisernen Vorhangs
• Wismut
• Das mediale Erbe der DDR

Further collections are being prepared.

Contact at the ZZF: Franziska Ernst

Kooperationspartner:
NFDI4memory, Oral-History.Digital