Archive

The Archive of the Academy is one of the oldest and most comprehensive academy archives in the world, as nearly all the source materials it has collected in its 300-year history have been preserved. Among the many important European academies founded during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, only the archives of the Royal Society in London and the Académie des sciences in Paris have older holdings. The materials in the Archive of the Academy in Berlin range from handwritten drafts by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to scientific manuscripts and letters by Nobel laureates Theodor Mommsen, Wilhelm Ostwald and Otto Warburg. In all, the Archive contains some 6,500 running metres of official documents and papers from private estates, as well as over 2000 objects of art.