The History and Fate of the Baltic Archives at the Herder Institute in Marburg

Scholars interested in the history of eighteenth-century Baltic region, paradoxical as it may sound, need to work at the Herder Institute in Marburg. The issue of trophy cultural property is rarely associated with the plundering of archives. The Russian Federation, for being the successor of the Soviet Union, suffered the most: it lost almost two-thirds of its archive collections in 1941–1944. Among them, a special role belongs to the archival documents stolen from the Baltic Republics occupied by the Wehrmacht and hidden at the end of the war in the salt mine of Grasleben in Lower Saxony. The ideological continuity typical of West German political thought (1949–1990) was particularly evident among archivists. The former participants in the “evacuation events”, often native Germans from the Baltic region themselves, held senior positions in the “Ostforschung” research centres that reopened in Marburg and Göttingen after 1945. In their minds, the Baltic archival documents remained the property of the ethnic Germans from Revel, Riga, and Dorpat living now in the Federal Republic of Germany. Using the example of the Tallinn (Revel) City Archive, this article analyses the fate of the archival funds of this region in the period which started in September 1939 with the “repatriation” of ethnic Germans from the Baltic countries and provisionally finished in the late twentieth century, during a phase of mutual trust in Russian-German relations. The paper reveals the reasons why, despite repeated requests of the Soviet government, the original documents of the City Archive of Revel were detained in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz and transferred to Tallinn only in 1990. Apart from this, it shows that “rescue measures” and actions of restitution are exceptions, and a considerable part of cultural property remains missing. The impact of the war is still present 80 years later, which also includes the consequences for historical scholarship. As for the eighteenth century that is of interest to the author of the article, the history of the Baltic provinces before the reign of Catherine II is still insufficiently studied, both in Russian historiography and in foreign Russian studies.