Origin and tradition: The Grand Ducal photo collection from the reign of Frederick I and his wife Luise probably originated from gifts, orders and acquisitions (e.g. while travelling). It is not yet possible to say to what extent there was a real will to collect, but the collection was carefully preserved, partly noted in inventory lists and probably moved from Karlsruhe Castle to the New Palace in Baden-Baden in 1919. There, even after the death of Grand Duchess Luise, he occasionally grew. When the castle inventory of 1995 was dissolved, the State of Baden-Württemberg was able to acquire the entire photo collection for the General State Archives; a selection of family photos and some magnificent volumes remained the property of the House of Baden. He also owns an essential part of the photo collection of the last Grand Duke, Frederick II, who fortunately was not kept in the Freiburg Palais after 1919. Content: The medium of photography was highly valued and consciously used at the Baden court as a modern form of princely representation. The distribution of portrait series to the public can be reconstructed and the long reign of Frederick I enabled the presence of the "father of the country" or the "parents of the country", as can be found among the Hohenzollern, the Wittelsbachers or the Habsburgs. Documents from these photo commissions to the court photographers make up a not insignificant part of the collection. The proportion of gifts and souvenir pictures received after anniversaries, celebrations, manoeuvres, exhibitions, inaugurations, etc. is greater; the handing over of portraits of foreign visitors also belonged to this group, especially in the context of the summer stays in Baden-Baden. One of the most important gifts are probably the works with which photographers wanted to attract attention, acquire the title of court photographer or receive further commissions; in this way, works from the early days of photography came into the Grand Duke's possession: signed prints by Charles Clifford, the Upper Italian and Southwest German series by Jakob August Lorent in 60x80 format already admired at the time of their creation (Lorent also left to the Grand Duke a detailed description of his recording and development process) or, to name regionally effective photographers, photographs by Richard/Heidelberg, Tillman-Matter/Mannheim, Th. shoe man
History of the possession of the island Mainau: After the abolition of the Kommende of the Teutonic Order on the island Mainau in 1805, the Kommenden possession first fell to the Baden state; today the Kommenden archive in the General State Archives consists mainly of the holdings 5 (documents Mainau) and 93 (files Mainau). After a rapid change of ownership - 1827 from Baden to Prince Nikolaus von Esterhazy, 1827 from his son Nikolaus Freiherr von Mainau to Katharina Gräfin Langenstein - Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden bought the island from Langenstein¿schem in 1853 with funds from the private box and made the Teutonic Order palace a secondary residence. With advancing age, the stays of the Grand Duke and his wife Luise became increasingly frequent; the park owes its design largely to Frederick's initiative. In 1907 the Grand Duke of Mainau died. After her death in 1923, the widow's residence of the Grand Duchess was transferred to her son Frederick II, and from him to his sister Victoria, Queen of Sweden. In 1930, their grandson Lennart, now Count Bernadotte, took possession of the Mainau. History and notes on tradition: The Schlossarchiv, which was handed over to the General State Archives in 1997 as a deposit of Blumeninsel Mainau GmbH, depicts the history of possession and the court holdings of the Grand Ducal couple rather fragmentarily. Only the planned stock has survived as a closed overdelivery complex. After the death of Frederick I, Grand Duchess Luise decided that neither the castle nor the park could be altered in any way, so the plans provide a good overview of the conversion of the old Kommende buildings and the layout of the park from the Grand Ducal period to the Bernadotte era. Almost all the plans came from the architects of the Grand Ducal Court Building Office (Dyckerhoff, Hemberger, Amersbach), a few from the Court Garden Centre, from commissioned companies and from the Constance District Building Inspectorate. Outside the island, only the St. Katharina estate near Litzelstetten and a park bench near Constance are documented. The plans were recorded in detail by Ms. Kreyenberg before they were handed over to the General State Archives; her index continues to serve as a finding aid for the plan inventory, while the file part of the archive consists only of fragments. There are internal and external reasons for this. The changing courtly style between Karlsruhe, Baden-Baden, Badenweiler and Mainau may have brought with it a transport of written documents, which in all residences allowed half site-related, half accidentally left behind layers of files to emerge. In many respects, the Mainau holdings correspond almost perfectly to the files that have been kept in the General State Archives since 1995 from the tradition in the New Palace in Baden-Baden: Here and there the boundaries between the files of the court authorities, the daily ceremony and the personal, princely estate can hardly be drawn exactly, here and there correspondence and telegram series, diaries and notebooks, private entries and greeting addresses, documents of the wide-ranging charity work of Grand Duchess Luise and much more can be found. (cf. GLA 69 Baden, Collection 1995 A, B, D, F I, FII, G , K). In a nutshell, the Mainau collection - insofar as it does not directly refer to the Mainau court - microscopically depicts the Baden-Baden manor; both collections relate primarily to Grand Duchess Luise, and only in the second to her husband and children. As in Baden-Baden, the Mainau collection also includes a large group of photographs documenting, among other things, the close ties to relatives of the imperial family. Unlike in Baden-Baden, however, the fragmentary character of the Mainau archive also seems to be due to unintentional interventions. In the summer of 1945, the castle served as a military hospital for former concentration camp prisoners; during this time, they are said to have burned the archives, the bookkeeping and the more recent documentation of the island and to have taken documents with them when they were released in September (Alexander and Johanna Dées de Sterio, Die Mainau, Stuttgart / Zürich 1977 p.93). It will no longer be possible to reconstruct exactly what kind of archive this was; in any case, it must have been the written records of the goods administration which were taken over by the successors of the Teutonic Order and continued through the 19th century. Only fractions of files from this area have actually survived in today's inventory. Editor's report: Because of the difficult history of tradition, the order of the remaining holdings was not easy either. A separation according to personnel and court office conveniences would have made little sense and would also have been hardly possible in view of fragments that could hardly be allocated. Thus special occasions (such as birthdays and anniversaries) and special source genres (such as notebooks or telegrams) now form the highest order criteria, then the reference to persons or events and finally, within a unit of records, the chronological order; however, most of these units of records had to be formed first, since at the time the inventory was taken over any order of parts was not recognizable; as a rule they were loose, connected sheets.In August and September 1998, in the context of the training for the Higher Archive Service, the holdings were arranged by Claudia Maria Neesen and Christof Strauß under the guidance of the undersigned and recorded and indexed with the help of the MIDOSA programme package of the Landesarchivdirektion Baden-Württemberg. Karlsruhe, June 1999Konrad Krimm Conversion: The finding aid was converted in 2015. The final editing was carried out by Sara Diedrich in April 2016. The plans and building drawings were added under the inventory designation 69 Baden, Mainau K to the inventory 69 Baden, Mainau and listed under the signatures 69 Baden, Mainau K 1 to 69 Baden, Mainau K 209.
Content and Evaluation The Supreme (Land) Government was founded in 1806 as a collegial authority in the execution of the manifesto of King Frederick I's organization. It seems that the contemporary chancellory lists were uncertain about their correct spelling, at any rate the variants "Oberregierung" and - according to the predecessor authority in Ellwangen - "Oberlandesregierung" were represented almost equally frequently in the written material. The name is also misleading, because the authority was not a government in the current sense, but only a department of the Ministry of the Interior with responsibility for the so-called Regiminal Subject. According to the opinion of the time, this included in particular the safeguarding of the royal sovereignty rights, police matters throughout the country with the exception of the residential cities of Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg, the supervision of all state officials with the exception of the administration of justice, and the confirmation of elections to magistrate and other offices, Issues of subjects' and citizens' rights including emigration (deduction and after-tax), participation in military conscription, matters of prisons, breeding, labour and orphanages, poor institutions, trade, commerce and crafts as well as fire insurance. In 1807 the government college was divided into three subdepartments. In addition to the Department of Criminal Investigation, the Department of Police was established for security and police matters and the Department of Lending for feudal matters. On July 1, 1811, the responsibilities of the Department of Criminal Investigation and the Department of Police were reassigned to the Section of Internal Administration. In 1817 the newly founded district governments finally took over the tasks of this section. The present collection contains the special files of the category 'Princes' from the registry of the Supreme Government or the Section of Internal Administration, which is arranged alphabetically according to categories, although this title is rather misleading. In fact, the written records hardly concern relations with princely houses, and also the possessions of the often feared domestic and foreign class rulers located in Württemberg play at best a subordinate role in the holdings at hand. On the contrary, the contemporary registrars used the term 'princes' as a synonym for 'sovereigns', but they were not completely consistent, as the few files relating to cities or the monastery of St. Wolfgang in Engen show. In the main, the files deal with the interaction with the directly or indirectly neighbouring sovereign states, more than three quarters of the material concern relations with the Empire of France, the Grand Duchy of Baden and the Kingdom of Bavaria. In accordance with the turbulent times, war events, military, police (searches) and security matters play a prominent role, as do disputes over competing claims to sovereignty in the newly acquired former imperial territories and cities, trade blockades and customs harassment, as well as a colourful conglomeration of reciprocal attacks by authorities, officials and ordinary citizens on actual or alleged possessions of the respective neighbours and the retaliatory measures taken by them, but also efforts to achieve a contractual balance (borders, rights, disparities).) are represented. The files prove - particularly impressive in the case of the Landgraviate of Nellenburg, which was first allocated to Württemberg in 1806, the provisional Württemberg offices of Weiltingen and Nördlingen or the areas around Wiesensteig and Geislingen, Tettnang, Ravensburg and Ulm, which were also only briefly owned by Bavaria - the restlessness and often misunderstandings in the Paris treaties of 1810 until the settlement, The situation in the border regions was marked by provocations and acts of violence, the break-up of grown structures (such as parish priests), the abrupt interruption of road connections, the capping of rights, customs and habits by the new borders, and the liquidation of the structures created by the previous owners and the conditions left behind in the towns and regions that had finally become Württemberg after the State Treaty of 1810. D 44 is an almost flawless provenance collection, only in isolated cases do the files originate from predecessor or successor authorities (Bü 112: 'Retardatenkommission'; Bü 441 and 562: Oberlandesregierung Ellwangen; Bü 528: Fürststift Ellwangen). The local or regional assignment of each file follows the use of the registry of the upper government, which has assigned each operation to a particular ruling dynasty, but has not always done so correctly. Therefore, individual title recordings can reflect facts or events that cannot actually be expected from their territorial-dynastic classification, as for example in Bü 159, which contemporary registrars have assigned to the Grand Duchy of Hesse, but which contains mainly correspondence with the government in Karlsruhe due to the former Hanaulichberg places of reference in Baden since 1803. The - also already contemporary - assignment of the Büschel 379 to the Grand Duchy of Baden is not at all comprehensible from a factual point of view, since it is a matter of the request of the court chamber of Hesse and Darmstadt in Arnsberg for extradition of the documents relating to the Teutonic Order commander Mülheim from the archives of the Grand Master government in Mergentheim. Originally, the collection was divided into 59 bundles or federations, the contents of which were reproduced in the Marquart repertory (1912) only in keywords. In the course of the reworking these bundles were dissolved into a total of 673 individually recorded files with a total volume of 4.4 linear metres. The main running time ranges from 1806 to 1817, pre-files (mostly copies) go back to 1460, individual post-files have been added until 1834. Ludwigsburg, November 2010 Dr. Peter Steuer