By Paul Sprute
How can one research the activities of German companies in the Global South? In this blog post, I present an overview of archives relating to construction companies as one sector of German post-colonial business stemming from the work in the research project “Conquering (with) Concrete: German Construction Companies as Global Players in Local Contexts” (PI: Monika Motylińska). I ended up working within a dispersed archive between Europe and Africa, reliably uncovering exciting new case studies, which I might not have found in state archives. At the same time, the clear unevenness of these archives made it necessary to remain flexible in further developing these case studies, for example by working with photographic sources rather than correspondences. Here, it proved helpful that the archival question stands at the centre of disciplinary discussions in African history anyways, interlinked with the call to think creatively about possible alternative methods and sources. Similarly, for German colonial history, the proposition of Nina Kleinöder and others that long overlooked company archives provide insight into workers and localities alongside business ventures in the strictest sense made me aware of the broader constellations to which company documentation is linked.
Overall, the archives of German construction companies remind of ghost ships drifting about. Of the large German general contractors, none still operates as an independent company after either having repeatedly merged and turned into a subsidiary or having gone bankrupt. The company files and archives have been affected by these trajectories in different ways. Unfortunate consequences include that company archivists have been let go and company archives have been left to oblivion in shipping containers after mergers (as in the case of Hochtief), they have been entrusted to unknown former employees (as is also the case of Dywidag), or they have been demolished with the old buildings when companies moved headquarters (as in the case of Strabag) linking the contractor’s own material histories and their institutional memories.
Other archival holdings of construction projects still exist because of their potential business value. The bankrupt Dywidag’s construction plans were taken over by a legal firm which lets architects and owners of buildings built by Dywidag access plans for fees. Similarly, the archive of the engineering firm InrosLackner is of use to the company in its ongoing port planning projects in West Africa in cases where port authorities’ archives have disappeared with the buildings in which they were stored. In these cases, project documentation is treated as proprietary and difficult to access.
However, there are available public archival collections of former large German contractors, notably the ones of Philipp Holzmann and Bilfinger SE. Both have also been influenced by the companies’ liquidations or restructuring. The Philipp Holzmann archive was split up over the course of the liquidation process from 2001 on with the photographic archive moving to the regional economic archive of Berlin and Brandenburg and the remaining archive, mostly plans, being taken over by the municipal archive of Frankfurt am Main where the company was based. The interest of a communal archive for the history of a construction company as part of the region’s history also led to the transfer of Bilfinger&Berger’s archival collection to the municipal archive of Mannheim, apart from the individual initiative of the company’s archivist. Both archival collections offer opportunities to engage with comparatively rich photographic collections and to read plans, while correspondences on specific construction projects are scarcer. Other publicly accessible collections of large general contractors include the partial holdings of Deutsches Museum in Munich of the aforementioned Dywidag (here appearing for a third time) and in different regional economic archives, for example of Wayss&Freytag in the Hessisches Wirtschaftsarchiv in Darmstadt.
In line with other work, my research shows that there were no overarching rules and standards of ‘the’ construction company archive. This does not only link to the history of preservation but also the circumstances of the production of the archive. Individual rationales about the usability of their keeping of construction documents and historical records had major consequences for the question what was retained and returned to Germany after the completion of an international project. Decisions were made on the spot by individual construction site managers.
Mariya Rusak offers a comparative case in her study of the Norwegian construction company Moelven Brug. Their archive was an eclectic, extensively pre-mediated collection of financial documents, stock returns and yearly board-meeting notes but no drawing or project documentation. Rusak’s findings are similar but also showcase important differences to my own, for example in the availability of financial documentation. Rusak worked around the archival gaps by relying on published sources, notably newspapers, books and technical reports. Noting that these collections introduced new problems of scope and critical reading, for example for technical reports, Rusak makes the observation that the scarcity of sources and excess of adjacent sources can be intertwined leading to extraordinary efforts in studying the ordinary.
Together, these examples illustrate the opportunities of using company archives as well as possible challenges and biases. On the one hand, it must be acknowledged that the implementation and management of construction projects, their practical challenges and social implications cannot always be fully captured from the company archives. On the other hand, unexpected discoveries are possible, precisely because of the lacking standards of archival retention: these may include photographs for one project, staff files for another or financial documentation in case of Rusak’s work.
Engaging with the archives of construction company archives is therefore worth the effort. Yet, their holdings should not be expected to make the inspection of adjacent holdings redundant. Rather, the archival holdings of the construction companies often highlight the potential of following specific projects in adjacent holdings. In my research, these include state archives, for example. European state archives helped to scrutinise rationales of European investors to engage with specific construction projects and companies while sources from African state archives made it possible to account for constructions projects of state- and nation-building, through files on the projects studied, sources on related projects and contemporary publications impossible to trace elsewhere.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
pcbhredaktion (November 13, 2025). The Archives of German Construction Companies and their Post-Colonial Projects. (Post-)Colonial Business History. Retrieved June 8, 2026 from https://pcbh.hypotheses.org/409
