Würzburg: A building register without buildings An attempt at the historical and topographical reconstruction of a destroyed city with the help of a combined analysis of diverse archival sources of the 17th to 19th centuries

• Applicants: Dr. Christian Naser; Dr. Alexander Wolz
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; Modern and Contemporary History ; Economic and Social History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 532989948

Until today, Würzburg has remained a city without a “Haeuserbuch”, and with buildings without a history. That it is not is due to the fact that, in many cases, there is no connection between the written archival sources and the existing buildings any more. And the reason for that is the near-total destruction of the inner city in WW II. Because of this, and unlike most traditional “Haeuserbuecher”, the projected „Haeuserbuch“ of the historic city cannot start with existing buildings as objects and then proceed to describe their architecture and building history, accompanied by construction plans and photographs, but leaving out the particulars of detailed information about the lives of their former owners and renters. The project presented here proposes a solution to the research problems by opening up the fundamental sources for a reconstruction of the social, economic, and building history of the city and combining them methodically in a data bank in such a way that synergies can be produced and multiple analyses of the various archival sources will be permitted over and beyond the narrower context of the building history which is in the foreground here. That this is not just wishful thinking is evidenced by the participants of this project: the University of Würzburg, the office for the preservation of archaeological monuments, the “Museum für Franken”, the City Archive of Würzburg, and the Würzburg branch of the Bavarian State Archives have joined in as collaborators and will profit from the results of this research both directly in their own work and by the publicity effects which may be expected. Registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials, tax registers and municipal accounts of various kinds, matriculation books of new citizens, registers of house sales and inheritance, of mortgage contracts or protocols of legal disputes – when considered jointly - reveal much more than just the history of the city’s buildings; the social and economic history of the city and its inhabitants will be clarified, extended, and enriched in many ways by this method. A revival of research in these fields which has somewhat stagnated for several decades in the case of Würzburg can be expected as well. As the data bank mentioned above will contain source materials which was created for very diverse purposes and for different political actors it will allow a surprising diversity of studies, too, and will without doubt lead to synergies in research efforts. Therefore, the institutions collaborating in this project will certainly not be the only ones to profit from it; instead, the project may serve as a model for other cities which have suffered comparable tradition losses, be it their written sources or their historic tangible, built-up fabric.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Participating Institution: Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg ; Philosophische Fakultät; Institut für Deutsche Philologie; Staatsarchiv Würzburg
• Co-Investigator: Privatdozent Dr. Christian Reul