Research archive

The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola (Sweden), Universidad de Valladolid (Spain) and Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Šafárika v Košiciach (Slovakia) ran the European Joint Doctorate Programme UrbanHIST | 20th Century European Urbanism together with 13 European partner organisations, including the Stadtmuseum Dresden, from October 2016 to July 2021. The programme was funded as part of the Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodovska-Curie Action.

The Stadtmuseum Dresden hosted doctoral students for several months as part of the urbanHIST programme. They were supervised by Dr Claudia Quiring, curator for architectural history and urban development.

Photographic portraits of Dresden citizens of the 19th century

Only a few closed collections have survived from the early days of the Stadtmuseum. For this reason alone, an almost completely preserved collection of around 2,700 portrait photographs on 2,100 support cartons is of particular importance. The initiator was the historian, city archivist and city library director Otto Richter (1852 – 1922), who was director of the museum from its foundation in 1891 until his retirement in 1912. He compiled portraits of important citizens (and also some female citizens) to create a photographic gallery of honour, which was intended to perpetuate their memory in the city. The approximately 650 plates labelled by Richter himself form the core of the collection.

The preservation, cataloguing and research of this important source of the city's history has been pursued for several years. With the support of the Saxon State Office for Museums, it has been possible to digitise all the fronts and backs of the panels and set up a database containing the relevant information on the images and the people depicted.

In 2014/2015, the City Museum was involved as a project partner of the Institute for Saxon History and Folklore (ISGV) in the conception and organisation of an exhibition to mark the conclusion of the DFG research project »The Worker's Eye« at the ISGV. After stops in Zwickau and Cologne, it was presented on 21 March 2015 under the title »Das Auge des Arbeiters. Memory Photography and Image Propaganda around 1930« in Dresden. The associated conference »Workers | Culture | History«, jointly organised by Wolfgang Hesse and Holger Starke, focused on the historical-political and media-historical aspects of the topic as well as the implications for museum work: What do the photographs of proletarian amateurs from the Weimar period show as »history«? How do they relate to other visual media? How does the context of the collection shape the possibilities of cognition?

The Dresdner Geschichtsbücher were published by the Dresden City Museum from 1995 to 2013. In the 18 volumes published, 133 authors wrote 207 articles on the diverse history of Dresden. Remaining volumes are available in the museum shop. All volumes can be viewed by appointment in the library in the Landhaus.

The table of contents of the Dresden history books, organised by subject, can be found here.