The "Active Archive: GDR" is an extensive archive of GDR art. It comprises a library with over 3,000 publications, a picture archive with about 10,000 illustrations, systematized according to iconographic themes from A for “Arbeitsbild” (work picture) to Z for “Zukunft” (future) and a press documentation on the reception of art, architecture and urban planning of the GDR in German-language newspapers and magazines.

The ABC of materials. Never before has the materiality of works of art possessed such an outstanding status as in contemporary art. The picture archive contains around 18,000 reproductions from European and American art magazines and catalogues from the sixties to the nineties, classified under 52 keywords according to material aspects from “Abfall” (waste) to “Zelluloid” (celluloid).

The research centre for Hamburg History investigates modern German history from the 18th to the 20th century. The collection includes thousands of books, documents, maps and plans as well as paintings and individual objects on social and cultural history, gender history, social and economic history, media history and urban history of the Hanseatic City of Hamburg.

The Centre for University History is dedicated to the research and communication of the history of universities and science, in particular the history of Hamburg University. The Library of University History, which belongs to the Centre, contains over 20,000 books, special editions and copied essays on the history of German-speaking universities and individual sciences.

The Archive of art in Hamburg is an archive for researching Hamburg art in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a special focus on the persecution of artists during the Nazi era. Correspondence, documents on theme-related exhibitions and a photo index of individual artists and works of art were collected. In total, the archive offers information on about 450 people and institutions from the Hamburg art scene.

In the Hamburg Narratology Archive, the life stories of Hamburg’s labourers, refugee stories of the war generation, or the popular religious practice of Iranians in Hamburg, can be heard or read. These were documented during about 1,500 interview hours from approx. 550 interviews on approx. 30,000 transcript pages and tapes.

The German Bible Archive researches and documents the history of the impact of the Bible in texts and images from the past and present in German-speaking areas. The core holdings of the archive are medieval Bible manuscripts, a special collection with illustrated bibles from the 20th century and a special library of relevant sources and research literature.

In its copperplate engraving collection, the State and University Library Hamburg houses approximately 3,200 sheets of print graphics dating from the 15th to the 19th century. Alongside the oldest sheets, which include works by Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach, one can discover engravings by numerous other renowned artists, primarily from the Italian, Dutch, German, and French schools.

The collection, which looks back on over 100 years of history, includes famous works of ancient sculpture, plaster casts of ancient sculptures, plastic relief models, portraits and cabaret from a period that extends from the Greek archaic era to the Classical and Hellenistic periods to the Roman period. The collection focuses on Greek and Hellenistic sculptures as well as Roman portraits

The media library houses a total of around 480,000 lantern slides and 35 mm-slides from the period 1900 to 1995. These include valuable collections from pre-university times, a large Hamburgensia collection and a collection on political iconography and book illumination. In addition, testimonies of past Hamburg architecture or the collection of antique church furnishings can be viewed and explored.

Professor Dr. h. c. Fritz Krenkow (1872 - 1953), a connoisseur of ancient Arabic language and literature and editor and translator of poetic, lexical and historical Arabic texts, member of the Dairat ul-Ma'arif of Haidarabad and Membre de l' Academie Arabe de Damas, donated his entire Arabic library with a total of 2,750 books to the Seminar for the History and Culture of the Middle East at the University of Hamburg in 1949. Between the pages of these books, numerous handwritten notes and notes by Fritz Krenkow were found, which in their entirety reflect his outstanding knowledge of the various branches of Arabic and Persian literature and his great passion and precision in comparing, translating and interpreting the content and characteristics of these literary works.

The art collection of the University of Hamburg comprises over 200 works by about 190 artists. Reliefs and sculptures in bronze and paintings from the 1950s to 1980s make up the largest part of the collection. These works convey a very good impression of a diverse and lively art in public spaces during the eventful history of the past century.

The Kuzmina Archive houses a collection of handwritten field notes and audio recordings compiled by Angelina Ivanovna Kuzmina (1924-2002) between 1962 and 1977 on the Selkulp language, an endangered Samoyed language from the Uralic language family that is still spoken in the Selkulp culture regions of Tomsk and in the Tazthe Valley in Siberia.

Werner von Melle (1853-1937) was a Hamburg senator, president of the school board, and the first mayor of the city of Hamburg. Von Melle is considered the founding father of the University of Hamburg.

The Warburg Archive collects materials relating to the history of the discipline of art history, especially in Hamburg. These include, above all, material related to Aby Warburg and the cultural studies library he founded in Warburg as well as the circle of scholars associated with the Warburg Library of Cultural studies (“Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg”,K.B.W) , such as Fritz Saxl, Gertrud Bing and numerous students of the 1920s.