Archiv der Münchner Arbeiterbewegung e.V.

The Archive of the Munich Workers' Movement was founded in 1987. The impetus for this was provided by the exhibition "Empor zum Licht – Arbeitersänger und Arbeitersportler in München vor 1933", organized by the Cultural Department of the City of Munich and the DGB district of Munich. Since then, the archive has taken on the task of securing, archiving and presenting more than 150 years of social history of working people and their organizations. In letters, documents, memoirs, photographs and everyday objects, the history of the "ordinary people" in Munich is documented and thus important aspects of the city's and regional history are also illuminated. The collection, processing and cataloguing of the archival holdings also makes them accessible to scientific research. The long-term goal is to establish a Museum of Work in Munich.

The Archive of the Munich Workers' Movement collects testimonies and documents from the everyday life of working people, the workers' movement, the new social movements and industrial culture in Munich.

Important objectives are:

• to save the history of working people and their organizations from oblivion.
• to protect, preserve and archive contemporary testimonies and documents from forfeiture and destruction.
• to make the archival holdings accessible to the public through exhibitions, lectures and publications.

The archive is supported in its work by the Cultural Department of the City of Munich.

The Archive of the Munich Workers' Movement collects archival material that is related in a broader sense to life and work in Munich and the surrounding area. These include, for example, collections and estates of persons, the archives of organizations of the labor movement, such as trade unions, political parties, associations; as well as traditions of social movements and documents from the everyday life of employees.

An overview of the collections and witnesses can be found https://www.arbeiterarchiv.de/archiv/.

The Archive of the Munich Workers' Movement also holds about 1500 compensation proceedings of the Munich lawyer Koni Kittl.

Konrad "Koni" Kittl was a Munich lawyer. In the 1950s and 1960s in particular, he represented about 1,500 people who had been deprived of their rights and persecuted during National Socialism in enforcing their claims for compensation for "damage to body and health" suffered. Some of the proceedings dragged on until the 1970s and 1980s. While almost all other lawyers who had handled compensation proceedings destroyed their files, Konrad Kittl handed over his documents to the Archive of the Munich Workers' Movement e.V. in 2009. Since 2015, Steffen Müller, an employee of the archive, has been systematically processing this unique collection and recording the files in a database. The tradition not only provides insight into the various stages of the National Socialist persecution policy and the suffering inflicted on the Jewish population of Europe, but also into the practice of compensation in the Federal Republic of Germany in the post-war period. The results of his evaluation and a lot of further information are now presented on a specially designed website.

Publications can be found and ordered here.