Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
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Zentralarchiv
For over 130 years, the establishment of an archive or a documentation facility within the Royal Museums, later the National Museums in Berlin, remained a desideratum. Only in 1960, a central archive was formally installed on the Museum Island. For a long period, this archive lead a rather inconspicuous existence. Nevertheless, the historic records which were gathered together and preserved during these initial years form today's cadre of historic memory. 1965 saw the foundation of a separate archive for the Nationalgalerie (National Gallery). This not only conserved the Gallery's historic records but also directed its attention to the documentary collections, such as the collections of 19th and 20th century art and of modern art in the Kronprinzen-Palais, as well as to the documentation of "Degenerate Art", modern art ostracized under National Socialism. The establishment of a building archive on the Museum Island in the mid-1980s provided an additional basis of historic documentation for the National Museum's department of building administration. In 1987, these three archives were fused to form today's central archive, the Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, a final and comprehensive archival resource.
