From 1914 to 1918, libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, and private individuals tried to document the First World War as thoroughly as possible within their collections. Contemporaries perceived the war as so significant that they sought to preserve all kinds of materials for posterity. They recognized that, for the first time, the war was being fought not only on the battlefronts but also in the mass media.
The University Library of Erlangen-Nuremberg (UB) has a collection on World War I. In addition to books, magazines, and newspapers, the collection contains postcards, maps, posters, letters sent from prisoner-of-war camps in Erlangen and Grafenwöhr, food ration cards, and emergency money. The access directory states the collection’s objective as follows: “War 1914 NB! The existing literature on the war of 1914 is to be compiled here…”
The collection is listed in the university library catalog and has been fully digitized. A Germany-wide web portal lists the holdings of 235 First World War collections and their materials, which remain to this day. State and city libraries were particularly active in the war collection movement at the time and are now organized in the Working Group of Regional Libraries of the German Library Association. These libraries present the preserved materials on the joint portal, “Kriegssammlungen in Deutschland 1914-1918.”
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