Today, we tend to associate wax with candles or cosmetics. In Europe, however, it was still used as a medium for writing as late as the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. In salt-producing regions, important records were kept on wax, which withstood the salty air around the production sites particularly well.

The Halle City Archives hold several books of wax tablets bearing ownership records and feudal legal arrangements related to the four brine springs at Hallmarkt square. The books look their age, with many scratches, deposits, and cracks as a result of dehydration. Some of the tablets have slipped out of their frames entirely.

The restored wax tablet book reveals how many members of Halle’s middle classes, such as the influential Oleariuses, a family of Protestant theologians, benefited financially from salt production during the period of the book’s creation. Towns such as Lüneburg and Schwäbisch-Hall likewise owed their prosperity to salt production.

Wax tablets did have an inherent disadvantage, however. They were easy to manipulate, which made it necessary to maintain three copies of each of the books. The annual procedure of comparing the copies, resolving old entries, and adding new ones – "keeping the loan book", as this was called in a 1793 description and history of the Halle Saltworks – was accompanied by festivities.

Some written materials come in bizarre forms. This papier-mâché anatomical horse model can be dismantled into more than 150 pieces and weighs more than 200 kilogrammes (440 pounds). Small paper labels identifying the horse’s body parts are scattered throughout the object. It remained in use as an instructional model until the late twentieth century.  Only a handful of similar examples are known to exist. Since 2012, the horse – located at the Central Repository for Natural Science Collections in Halle – has been designated as nationally valuable cultural property to be preserved for posterity.

The silk scrolls from the holdings of the Leipzig University Library are atypical for written material: the writing surface is silk rather than paper. These Chinese legal documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth century record the imperial chancery’s appointments of civil servants. The scrolls themselves are often large-scale, and they involve complex combinations of fabric and paper. Restoring them in a 2019 KEK pilot project constituted an immense challenge: how should this mixture of media be treated?

The parchment bearing the text of the Gospels, dating from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, had been heavily damaged and soiled. Some of the pages had fallen prey to bacteria, and the richly illuminated miniatures in one of the three manuscripts had decomposed. The bindings were also in poor condition. Restoration was urgently needed.

After the restoration work, the manuscripts were digitised, transcribed and indexed. The enhanced digital versions can be viewed in the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room, a cooperation between the Bible Museum and the Institute for New Testament Textual Research at the University of Münster.

The landscape architect Hans Schmidt (1879–1958) moved to Dessau in 1918. Until the Second World War, he played a crucial role in shaping the city’s appearance. Schmidt’s plans, created in the tradition of the historic Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz, further connect to questions of landscape design for our own era, especially in regions shaped by industry. The drawings at the Municipal Archive Dessau-Roßlau could be useful for implementing reconstruction measures. When new urban planning projects emerge, they give clues into the structure of the city as it evolved historically.

Because he designed municipal parks and green-space areas and sometimes taught at the university level, Schmidt also worked for institutions of the Nazi regime from 1933 onward. However, according to research, he kept his distance from the Nazi Party. After the war, he was therefore able to resume teaching in Dessau.

German-speaking exiles were anything but silent from 1933 to 1945. They made their voices heard in around 450 magazines. From cultural politics to literature to scholarship, the periodicals’ content was as varied as their physical shapes and sizes. Copies of these publications, produced around the world, comprise a unique and valuable source for research. Some 34,000 magazines of this kind are stored at the German National Library’s two locations. From 2020 to 2021, as part of the BKM Special Programme, around 13,450 of the magazines were cleaned, processed for conservation and repackaged.

During the Nazi dictatorship, many German-speakers, most of them Jewish, were forced to emigrate. Around eighteen to twenty thousand of them found refuge in Shanghai. Learning English was an important aspect of their new day-to-day lives. In Shanghai, the refugees used the magazine Die Tribüne to hone their language skills. It was published from February to May 1940 with a print run of around 1,000 copies.

In the October 1940 edition, the "Little by Little" column explained English idioms. Just a few pages later, the tailor Emanuel Kohn and the Malkischer orthopaedic workshop advertised their services. The issue also contains literary contributions by Heinrich Man ("The Power of the Word") and Anton Kuhn ("Pallenberg on Hitler").