Leibniz Institute of European History
[3] Founded in 1950 on the initiative of Raymond Schmittlein, the head of the Direction Générale des Affaires Culturelles of the French military government, the new institution had the aim of helping to overcome the longstanding nationalist and confessional divides between the European states and their populations through “non-prejudiced” historical research and, in so doing, to support Franco-German reconciliation in particular.
Research at the IEG thus targets pan-European and partly European communicative connections originating in bilateral and multilateral transfer processes.
The institute's charter defines the primary goals of the IEG as follows: "Research on the religious and intellectual traditions of Europe, their development and crises, and particularly on religious differences, their effects and the possibilities of overcoming these differences", and "Europe-focused fundamental research which assists the historical understanding of the process of the coalescence of Europe and the individual historical paths of the European states and peoples".
[5] Together with the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the IEG runs the graduate project "The Christian Churches and the Challenge of 'Europe'”, which is part-funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG).
In cooperation with its international partners, the institute supports the exchange of fellows to embed them in a network of European historical research.
Funding is provided for both doctoral and postdoctoral research dealing with the religious, political, social and cultural history of Europe from the early modern period to 1989/90.
[8] For decades, the IEG has been receiving other scholarship holders and fellows funded by organizations abroad and in Germany (for example, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the DAAD) as visiting academics.
These visiting researchers, who are usually young academics, usually stay at the institute where they become part of the international community of IEG fellows and scholarship holders.
Far beyond the confines of academia, there exists a wide interest in research findings and resources published in Open Access – for instance, the wide range of digitized historical maps or European History Online (EGO), published in German and English, which provides an overview of 500 years of modern European history across boundaries of geography, discipline, and methodology.
The library offers approximately 90,000 printed titles and 900,000 licensed online resources on the history of Europe from the mid-15th century.
The catalogue also contains the new acquisitions of the current year and a large array of online resources and databases funded by the German Research Foundation.
It runs a server for historical digital maps (IEG-MAPS[10]) and publishes European peace treaties of the early modern period.
