11. (Re-) Writing the History of IGU? A Report from the Archives

The International Geographical Union (IGU), the international organization for geography, was founded in 1922. In its almost 100-year history, and even in the decades before, the involved geographers produced a great number of printed as well as non-printed materials. Besides the self-experienced and individual IGU history, the written (and visual) tradition offers a unique basis to analyze and reconstruct an important part of international geography in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. After several destinations and sometimes nebulous life phases, the IGU collection has a new home at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig. The cataloguing and indexing has just begun. In general, we deal with two kinds of media within the IGU Archive: printed and handwritten textual documents on paper and in digital formats as well and audio-visual documents, a few photographs and, especially, video tapes and digital copies containing interviews. For every kind of these sources, a different kind of storing and analysing has to be developed. This chapter gives an insight into the IGU Archive, especially with a focus on the possibilities and limits of (re-)writing the history of international geography.