Reduced service, September 2026. The Institute remains open and its collections, card indexes and correspondence are in order, but it works at the minimum compatible with the care of the material and with obligations already entered into. The reading room opens on Wednesday and Thursday, 10.00–15.30 and by written appointment only; three posts stand vacant and may not be filled; no colloquium is being held this year; and three works are complete and unprinted for want of the printing budget. The reasons are set out under History of the Institute. These pages are revised twice a year, in March and September.

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History of the Institute, 1897–2026 Von der Hilfskartei zur Forschungsanstalt

The Institute did not begin as a research programme. It began as a pile of cards that nobody had time to sort. In the winter of 1897 the manuscript department of the ducal library at Wolfenbüttel set up an auxiliary card index for its medieval charters, staffed by three librarians and one clerk, whose work was to identify the script of each document, copy out its dating clause, hazard a date, and file the card by year. That "auxiliary" task ran for thirty-five years, acquired a method, then a discipline, and finally an institution of its own. What follows is set out in six periods.

I. The auxiliary card index, 1897–1931

Its first head was Friedrich Overbeck (1859–1926), a classicist by training who turned to diplomatics because the charters in his care had to be dated before they could be catalogued. In 1901 he compiled the oldest index still in use, known ever since as the Overbeck index and now numbered KI-1: 4,120 cards arranged by the recipient's name, each carrying on the face the date, place of issue and issuer, and on the back the character of the script and the presence or absence of a seal. That arrangement survived for nearly ninety years, until the three-part card in use today was introduced in 1990.

In 1908 Karl Menzel (1874–1941), then an assistant librarian, found while arranging the library's old coins that local collectors and parish clerks were willing to report finds, and in 1911 he opened a second series of cards for coin descriptions (KI-3), recording the coins and rubbings of the Lower Saxon and upper Weser mints. It is from that drawer that Division I descends.

Between 1914 and 1918 the single clerk was called up and work very nearly stopped; Menzel kept the register going in his holidays. The inflation of 1923–24 wiped out the library's book fund, and the unit turned to exchange: duplicate cards, sent abroad, brought back the publications of learned societies in Vienna, Zürich and Uppsala. That exchange is still running, and is described under Partner institutions.

Overbeck died in 1926 leaving a manuscript on the scripts of Wolfenbüttel charters, which Menzel prepared for the press in 1929. It was the Institute's first separate publication and is counted in the bibliography as Vorheft 1.

II. A separate institution, 1932–1943

On 1 April 1932 the library board detached the unit from the manuscript department. It was renamed the Wolfenbüttel Office for Charter and Coin Research, given three rooms in the west wing, a budget of its own and one established post. The Institute dates its corporate existence from that day, although it counts its age from 1897.

After 1933 German learned institutions were subjected to wholesale reorganisation. The Institute was small and its subject obscure, and it escaped the worst of it; but in 1936 Menzel was required to retire early and was succeeded by Hans Joachim Rehder (1902–1975), who shifted the emphasis towards the relation between monetary circulation and administrative boundaries. In 1938 Rehder established a duplicate archive of seal impressions (SG-1), which grew to some 2,300 items. Because it was kept in two places it survived the bombing of 1943 entire, and it remains the oldest group of objects the Institute owns.

From September 1939 the staff were called up one by one until only Rehder and an assistant remained. In November 1943 the west wing was hit: two of the Institute's three rooms burnt, and with them some quarter of the original cards of KI-1 and KI-3. The loss is still visible in the Overbeck index, where the years 1908 to 1912 survive only as duplicates in a different hand; the microfilm made in 2001 notes the fact on every such card.

III. Suspension and revival, 1943–1951

Public work stopped in the winter of 1943 and ceased altogether in 1944. Rehder was conscripted into the Volkssturm in 1944, taken prisoner by the British in May 1945 and released in the autumn of 1946. His first act on returning was to go down to the library cellar to see whether the seal impressions had taken damp. The sentence he wrote about it in the circular announcing the Institute's revival in 1951 — "Die Abklatsche sind trocken", the impressions are dry — is the one line of Institute prose that everybody here knows by heart.

Between 1947 and 1950 Wolfenbüttel lay in the British zone, and the Institute had no establishment at all; Rehder kept the cards in order as a temporary library employee, helped by a small grant from the Education Branch of the Control Commission for sorting parish archives. In June 1951 the Lower Saxony ministry of culture approved its revival as a state research institute with four posts, and in 1953 it moved into the building beside the old archive where it still is.

IV. Growth and division, 1951–1974

For ten years the watchword was "arrange first, publish afterwards". The first supplement to the Overbeck index was finished in 1954, and in 1957 the Institute founded the Mitteilungen, at first a fortnightly duplicated sheet, from 1962 an annual volume.

In 1961 a documentary editing group was added, to edit and index the charters of the duchy. Its first head was Ilse von der Heyde (1918–1994), the Institute's first woman on the academic staff, whose edition of the Lüneburg ducal charters, volume one of 1968, is still the model for the house conventions. In 1965 a group for the study of writing followed, under Gerhard Stolz (1929–2011), working on the identification of scribes. With that, the three directions that still define the Institute — coin, charter, writing — were all in place.

In 1971 the Institute concluded a joint cataloguing agreement with the archive administrations of Hannover, Brunswick and Hildesheim, fixing a common card format and a common vocabulary for the dating of charters. The effect was to turn a house index into an instrument of inter-institutional reference, and enquiries multiplied threefold during the 1980s.

V. The laboratory years, 1974–1996

In 1974 a one-off capital grant from the Land paid for the laboratory building in the courtyard and for a laboratory with a specific-gravity balance, a microscope and a simple X-ray fluorescence set, used for the non-destructive testing of coin alloys and of ink on parchment. Its first head was Dieter Bruns (1938–2009). The laboratory was at first for internal use only; from 1979 it took work from outside, and from 1985 it has arranged the coin collections of museums in the Land.

In 1981 the Institute held the first Wolfenbüttel Colloquium on Charters and Writing, with thirty-one participants; it has been held every two years since, and for the twelfth time in 2023. In 1989 the Institute founded, with an academic publisher elsewhere, the series Wolfenbütteler Studien zu Urkunde und Schrift, of which thirty-six volumes have appeared. In the same year all card indexes were converted to the present three-part form, and microfilming began; the first run was complete by 1998.

VI. Digitisation, and what came of it, 1996–2024

In April 1996 the Institute first appeared on the Internet, as a single page in the state research network's directory of institutions, giving nothing but an address and a list of names. In October 2004 it acquired a domain and the layout still in use, and the site grew to some forty pages. Between 2006 and 2012 a search facility for the card indexes was offered experimentally, for the Institute's own staff and for partner archives, and it was withdrawn in January 2013 when the contractor ceased to support it and the Institute found it had neither the staff nor the money to maintain a database. Enquiries are answered by post and telephone instead; some eight hundred a year were handled in this way before the reduction of 2026, and fewer now.

In 2008 the laboratory was re-equipped with digital capture and portable instruments. In 2011 a documentation group was created — Division V since 2013 — with responsibility for authority files, image capture and the Institute's internal data rules; digitisation ceased to be a sideline. In 2016 the Institute concluded an image exchange agreement with four archive administrations in the Land and began cataloguing images supplied by them.

Between March 2020 and May 2021 public reading was interrupted several times. Academic staff worked from home on the existing card stock, so that the number of new entries rose rather than fell in 2020. Full service resumed in 2022, the twelfth colloquium was held in 2023, and in 2024 the sixth fascicle of the coin catalogue was sent to press. The years after that are described in section VII.

VII. Working at reduced scale, 2025–2026

The reduction did not come suddenly and it was not a surprise to anybody who had read the ministry's letters. In October 2025 the ministry began a review of the smaller research institutions of the Land and asked each of them what it would cease to do if its grant were cut. The Institute's answer, submitted on 28 November 2025, was in three parts: that the care of the collections and of the card indexes could not be reduced without loss that could not afterwards be made good; that obligations already entered into — the editions in the press, the DFG project, the agreements with partner archives — had to be honoured; and that everything else was available to be set aside, including its own research, its publications beyond those already promised, its participation in conferences abroad, and the quarterly revision of its website. The statement is in the archive as Akt 41/2.

The budget for 2026 reduced the block grant available for consumables, travel, printing and equipment by about eighteen per cent. Salary costs were not touched; what was cut was everything that a small institute can actually spend at its own discretion. Three posts fell vacant at much the same time — a technical post in documentation at the end of 2025, a laboratory post in July 2025 that had never been filled, and a half-time post in Division I — and a general freeze on recruitment meant that none of them could be filled. Two student assistantships lapsed, and no assistants were taken on in 2026. The Institute therefore works with eighteen people where it had twenty-one, and one of its six divisions, documentation, consists of its head alone.

The conference of the Institute met on 13 January 2026 and decided what follows from that, in the plainest terms it could manage. Nothing is to be left half done: work already begun and promised is to be finished, however long it takes. No new project is to be taken on, and no new agreement signed. The reading room is to open two days a week by appointment rather than four days openly, so that the fetching and returning of material can be done by the same two people who answer the letters. The index of scribes is to go on being corrected, because incorrect entries mislead everybody who uses them, but it is not to be extended. The fibre projector is not to be repaired. The revision of the reference numbers, which Division V had been preparing since 2022, is set aside, and with it the intake of images from partner archives. And the colloquium, which was to have been held in September 2025 and then in September 2026, is postponed without a date.

The effects are visible in the figures rather than in any dramatic event. The card indexes grew by 2,010 entries in 2025 and by about 1,360 in the first eight months of 2026, against more than three hundred a month in 2023. The reading room received 121 visitors in 2025 and 54 in the first eight months of 2026. Some 700 written enquiries were answered in 2025 and 388 so far this year, each of them taking longer to answer. The sixth fascicle of the coin catalogue, which was to have appeared in the spring of 2025, appeared in November 2025; the second volume of the Hildesheim charters, due in the autumn of 2025, has been at the printer since June 2026; the DFG project, which was to have ended in December 2027, has been extended by a year. The second batch of the review of undated charters, 210 charters that Division II had already selected, has been put back into the cabinet.

What has not changed is worth saying as plainly. The strongroom is at 17 °C and 50 per cent relative humidity, and is read twice a week. The card indexes are in order and are still searched, on application, by hand. Enquiries are not refused; they are answered more slowly. The agreement with the partner archives stands, and the partner archives have been told exactly what to expect, which is that the Institute will go on describing its own holdings and will not take in theirs for the present. And the Institute has not asked to be relieved of any duty it owes the material in its care; it has only stopped doing the things that could be stopped.

Whether this is a period or a permanent condition, nobody here can say, and it would be idle to pretend otherwise. Three considerations are recorded in the conference's minutes of June 2026 and are set out here because they bear on the question more directly than anything in the budget. The first is that the ministry's review of the smaller research institutions of the Land, opened in October 2025, is not expected to conclude before 2027, and that the Institute has been asked, in the course of it, to state what it would cease to do if its grant were reduced further; the answer submitted in November 2025 (archive, Akt 41/2) reads, to those who wrote it, like a plan for closing in stages. The second is arithmetic: of the eighteen people in post, four reach retirement age within five years, and the three posts now frozen are the three most recently established, so that the Institute is growing older and thinner at the same time. The third is that the two divisions reduced to one person each — documentation and the laboratory — carry work that cannot be done by one person indefinitely: the laboratory's own rules require two, and the image archive needs somebody who was there when it was made.

If the grant is restored, the first things to be resumed would be the reading room hours and the colloquium, in that order, and the printing of the three finished works after them. Until then this website is revised twice a year, because revising it more often would mean taking the time from something else. That is the whole of the explanation, and it will be corrected here as soon as it stops being true — or, if it stops being true in the other direction, it will not be corrected at all, since there is nobody here now who could do it.

Table of dates

Heads of the Institute

On Table 2: the reason for Menzel's early retirement in 1936 is recorded in the Institute's files (Akt 12/4) only as "carried out under the regulations then in force". Researchers who need the file should apply under the regulations; personal data in the Institute's archive is subject to a closure period of ten to thirty years.