Pilot project AIDS-Archive

The AIDS Archive is a pilot project of the Research Center for the Cultural History of Sexuality in collaboration with the Humboldt University Library (Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum) that aims to establish a basis for a collection on the cultural history of HIV/AIDS. The collection centres on private as well as institutional materials which exemplify the personal, cultural and political histories around HIV/AIDS and will expand the Haeberle-Hirschfeld Archive’s (Grimm-Zentrum) collections on the politics of HIV/AIDS.
In light of the substantial gaps around this subject in archives, libraries and collections, preserving and investigating materials on the cultural and political history of HIV/AIDS is essential. We aim to develop a model collection that can be used for future research and as a prototype for other collections on HIV/AIDS.
In expanding the existing collection in Haeberle-Hirschfeld-Archive, we seek to preserve the traces that living with HIV and AIDS has left over the last few decades, not only for homosexual men. New forms of self-organisation, empowerment and political intervention that have developed from the beginning of the 1980s will be documented in the collection.
The collection covers the time span from 1980 to 2017 and includes personal accounts and pieces of art, academic and institutional publications als well as documents of activist groups. For a large part it consists of non-official in-house documents such as drafts, e-mails, letters, minutes and notes. The collection enables research on HIV/AIDS in the context of issues of LGBTIQ communities, drug use, migration, heterosexual and bisexual communities, haemophilia, aids denial amongst others.