The historian Christoph Bachmann is the new head of the Bavarian Main State Archives. Bachmann was officially inducted into his new post at a ceremony on Wednesday. His predecessor Bernhard Grau, who had headed the Main State Archives since 2018, is now Director General of the Bavarian State Archives.
Bachmann enters a terrain with which he is very familiar. After his traineeship at the archive school in Munich in the 1990s, he took up his first position at the Munich State Archives. In 2005 he was transferred to the Main State Archives, where he headed the “Recent Holdings” department. From 2013 he headed the Munich State Archives.
Rolf-Dieter Jungk, head of the Ministry of Science, said in his ceremonial speech that the transfer of office was taking place “at an absolutely key point in our cultural state.” Grau called the archives a pillar of the rule of law, and Bachmann spoke of a pillar of democracy, which the speakers justified in an understandable way. At the same time, constantly increasing tasks and responsibilities went hand in hand with ever faster processes, scarce financial resources and the threat of the staff being overwhelmed.
The task of the century is certainly the digitization of the holdings, although the money and, above all, the human resources that would be needed to digitize all archival materials are far from available. A problem that not only affects the main state archive, but also the eight state archives in Landshut, Amberg, Augsburg, Bamberg, Coburg, Munich, Nuremberg and Würzburg as well as the 1000 public and private archives in Bavaria. Nevertheless, Bachmann appeared as a convinced optimist and asserted that he was foolishly happy to hold the office and to be able to work for the benefit of democracy.
The Bavarian Main State Archive keeps files from authorities and courts from the time of the former duchy, the electorate, the kingdom and today’s Free State of Bavaria. With around four million archive items, it is the largest archive in Bavaria and one of the largest document archives in Europe.