The research institute employs around 25 research and project staff, administrative staff and librarians. The institute is a scientific society constituted as an association, comprising a maximum of 40 researchers from Germany and abroad. Other bodies of the association are the Executive Board, the board of trustees, the Scientific Advisory Board and the Management. The Institute is headed by the Chair of the Executive Board. Since its foundation, this post has been held by Theodor Mayer (1956 to 1970), Karl Bosl (1970 to 1980), Ferdinand Seibt (1980 to 2003) and Martin Schulze Wessel (since 2003). The CC’s core funding is provided by the Free State of Bavaria. In addition, research and infrastructure projects are carried out using third-party funding.

Up until the Nazi era, there was no academic institution in Germany dedicated to the culture and history of the Bohemian lands or Slovakia . Even at the universities of the German Reich, the study of Bohemian history was not firmly established. This began to change in 1935 with the appointment of the Moravian geographer Fritz Machatschek (1876–1957) to Munich. Machatschek took over as director of the Southeast Institute there and promoted research on Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, until 1945, the focus of German-language historical Bohemian studies lay in the Bohemian lands themselves, namely at the German Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague, the Historical Commission of the German Academy of Sciences in Prague, and the Sudeten German Institute for Regional and Ethnic Research in Reichenberg/Liberec.

After the end of the war and the expulsion, scholars from these institutions endeavoured to build on the Sudeten German academic institutions and their traditions in Germany. Several Sudeten German scholars were involved in the founding of the Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council in Marburg in 1950; in 1954, they established the Historical Commission of the Sudeten Lands in Heidelberg, complete with an academic Office. Among the displaced Sudeten German academics, the ‘Prague Circle’ was particularly influential. Its members included the Eastern European scholar and later Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Theodor Oberländer (1905–1998); the archivist Kurt Oberdorffer (1900–1980); the medievalist and first CC chairman Theodor Mayer (1883–1972), and the journalist, displaced persons’ official and member of the Bavarian State Parliament Walter Becher (1912–2005). The fact that the academic office of the Historical Commission for the Sudeten Lands was expanded into a separate research centre in 1956 was primarily due to political pressure from Becher and the Gesamtdeutscher Block/BHE (GB/BHE) party. The BHE, or GB/BHE – of which Becher was a member as a Bavarian Member of the State Parliament from 1950 to 1962 – had been represented in the SPD-led Bavarian State Government since 1954. The founding of the CC, however, was not merely a Sudeten German project. The support provided by the Bavarian state government was also linked to the aim of making Munich a centre for West German research into Eastern Europe and contemporary history. After all, the Südost-Institut, the Osteuropa-Institut and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte were already based there at that time. In a policy speech to the Bavarian State Parliament on 17 January 1956, the Social Democratic Minister-President Wilhelm Hoegner (1887–1980) announced the establishment of the CC, which was formalised on 25 October 1956 when the Executive Board adopted the Articles of Association. Financing was initially provided by the Federal Government and the Free State of Bavaria in a ratio of 2:1. The Federal Government later withdrew from the financing arrangement.

The stated aim of ensuring the continuity of Sudeten German scholarship in the Federal Republic was enshrined in the name and statutes of the CC. Collegium Carolinum is the Latin name for the historic main building of Prague University (Czech: Karolinum). The statutes refer to the ‘tradition of the University of Prague – including the German University in Prague which existed from 1882 to 1945’.[2] There were also strong continuities with the wartime and pre-war periods in terms of content and personnel. Projects such as the Sudeten Atlas, the biographies of Sudeten Germans and the Sudeten German dialect dictionary had already been launched before the war and were now continued. Initially, the CC was staffed by academics for whom the Nazi era had in many cases provided a career boost, but for whom the end of the war in 1945 had marked a turning point. Some members of the CC, such as the former SS member Oberdorffer and Hermann Raschhofer (1905–1979), a lawyer and former adviser to Karl Hermann Frank (1898–1946), had been staunch National Socialists. For them and other displaced academics, who had long had to search for a suitable post in post-war Germany, the founding of the CC also meant the opportunity to secure an institutional affiliation. However, initially the CC was not an Institute in the strict sense of the word, but organised conferences and awarded a limited number of research grants. This did not change until 1960, when the first full-time research fellow was appointed.

Two areas of disagreement regarding the Institute’s focus characterised its early years. In particular, it was unclear whether the Institute should primarily undertake policy advisory or academic tasks. A group led by Raschhofer and Becher, which was also supported by organisations representing displaced persons such as the Sudeten German Council, advocated for the CC to play a greater role in political advisory work. However, a majority of the founding members, including the chairman Theodor Mayer, viewed the CC as a strictly academic research institute. To give expression to this ambition, they prioritised publishing activities. A significant milestone was the launch of the *Bohemia* Yearbook in 1960, which, unlike other CC publication series, had no predecessor from the pre-1945 era in terms of its content or geographical scope. The controversial key figure in this development was the Bavarian medieval and regional historian Karl Bosl (1908–1993), who took over as Chairman of the CC’s Executive Board in 1970. He ultimately succeeded in upholding the institute’s academic mission in the face of pressure from the Sudeten German lobby and implemented further measures to enhance its professional standing, such as the establishment of an academic library in collaboration with the Sudeten German Archive and, in 1961–62, the integration of the Institute for Cultural and Social Research, formerly headed by the Sudeten German folklorist Josef Hanika (1900–1963). The original division into departments was abandoned and the CC was reorganised into an Institute focused primarily on historical research. At the same time, Bosl ignored the Nazi past of many of the association’s members in a publication on the Institute’s history.[3] His own role during the Nazi era has been the subject of controversy in recent years. He was a member of the NSDAP for a time, and his self-portrayal as a resistance fighter against the Nazi regime is now regarded as having been disproved.

However, the shift towards an academic focus had not yet led to a decision on the CC’s actual research subject. The question under discussion was whether the Institute should concern itself solely with the Sudeten Germans or with the Bohemian lands as a holistic region. There are contradictory statements on this matter. In his 1956 speech, Prime Minister Hoegner had highlighted the ‘supranational’ character of Prague’s university tradition and emphasised that the CC should ‘lay the foundations for academic cooperation, including with Slavic scholars’.[4] The CC was also described in its first statutes as a ‘research centre for the Bohemian lands’. At the same time, many founding members saw the CC as continuing the tradition of the ethnic policy of pre-war Czechoslovakia. Partly because of their own academic and professional backgrounds, and in some cases their significant involvement in Nazi injustices in the Bohemian lands, they were unwilling to move away from an antagonistic view of German–Czech relations. Consequently, in the internal discussions of the early days, the CC was repeatedly referred to as the ‘Sudeten German Institute’.

Bosl, in turn, contributed to a change in this stance, in particular through the four-volume ‘Handbook of the History of the Bohemian Lands’ (1967–1970), which he edited; this work was not confined to the ‘Sudeten lands’ and focused on the connections between Sudeten German and Czech history. From 1980 onwards, this development towards a holistic historical study of the Bohemian lands – and, increasingly, of Slovakia as well – was continued under the chairmanship of Ferdinand Seibt (1927–2003) and his deputy Hans Lemberg (1933–2009). Even at this stage, the perspective had been broadened to encompass the wider (Eastern) Central European region through the lens of intertwined histories. Nevertheless, the Sudeten German lobby’s influence on the CC, which was to remain effective for a long time to come, became apparent time and again. As late as 1982, Seibt defended himself with a certain bitterness against the accusation—which had evidently been raised repeatedly—that the CC was paying too little attention to the history of the Germans in the Bohemian lands.[5] The CC was also initially sceptical about the move to the newly built Sudeten German House in Munich’s Au district from December 1984 onwards, and once again raised objections to the threat of it being co-opted by Sudeten German lobbying.

• Karl Bosl: The Founding, Founders and Early Years of the Collegium Carolinum in Munich. A Contemporary Epilogue to the Twentieth Anniversary of the Research Centre for the Bohemian Lands. In: Bohemia 19 (1978), pp. 11–34.
• Christiane Brenner: ‘Sudeten German Historiography’ 1918–1960. On the background and foundation of the Historical Commission of the Sudeten Lands [conference report]. In: H/Soz/Kult, 15 November 2004. URL: https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-613 (27 February 2019).
• Christoph Cornelißen: Nothing but ‘strict scientific rigour’. The Collegium Carolinum in its Founding Decade (1955–1965). In: Christiane Brenner, K. Erik Franzen, Peter Haslinger and Robert Luft (eds.): Historiography of the Bohemian Lands in the 20th Century. Scholarly traditions, institutions, discourses; papers from the Collegium Carolinum conferences in Bad Wiessee from 21 to 23 November 2003 and from 12 to 14 November 2004. Munich 2006 (Bad Wiessee Conferences of the Collegium Carolinum 28), pp. 345–365.
• K. Erik Franzen: Bavaria’s Fourth Tribe. Patronage of the Sudeten Germans 1954–1974. Munich 2010 (Publications of the Collegium Carolinum 120), pp. 345–353, amongst others.
• Thekla Kleindienst: The Development of West German Research on Eastern Europe in the Tension between Academia and Politics. Marburg 2009 (Materials and Studies on East Central European Research 22), pp. 100–107.
• Thekla Kleindienst: Between Politics and Academia. Federal-funded Research on Eastern Europe. In: Christiane Brenner, K. Erik Franzen, Peter Haslinger and Robert Luft (eds.): Historiography on the Bohemian Lands in the 20th Century. Scholarly Traditions, Institutions, Discourses; Papers from the Conferences of the Collegium Carolinum in Bad Wiessee from 21 to 23 November 2003 and from 12 to 14 November 2004. Munich 2006 (Bad Wiessee Conferences of the Collegium Carolinum 28), pp. 317–344.
• Robert Luft: Germans and Czechs in the Bohemian Lands. Traditions and Changes in a Subfield of German Historical Scholarship. In: Christiane Brenner, K. Erik Franzen, Peter Haslinger and Robert Luft (eds.): Historiography on the Bohemian Lands in the 20th Century. Scholarly Traditions, Institutions, Discourses; Papers from the Collegium Carolinum conferences in Bad Wiessee from 21 to 23 November 2003 and from 12 to 14 November 2004. Munich 2006 (Bad Wiessee Conferences of the Collegium Carolinum 28), pp. 367–431.
• Michael Neumüller (ed.): 25 Years of the Collegium Carolinum Munich. Munich 2002.

• Collegium Carolinum conferences in Bad Wiesseer (since 1969)
• Biographical Encyclopaedia on the History of the Bohemian Lands (since 1974)
• Bohemia. Journal of the History and Culture of the Bohemian Lands (as an annual since 1960, as a journal since 1980)
• Dictionary of Sudeten German (since 1988)
• Publications of the Collegium Carolinum (since 1958)

• www.collegium-carolinum.de (Collegium Carolinum website)
• www.bohemia-online.de (open access to the journal Bohemia)
• www.collegium-carolinum.de/publikationen/digitale-publikationen/digiost (DigiOst hybrid publication series)
• www.ostdata.de (OstData digital research data service)

[1] Articles of Association of the Collegium Carolinum e. V., Munich (6 March 2014), p. 1.

[2] Articles of Association, p. 1.

[3] Bosl: Founding.

[4] Bosl: Foundation, p. 11.

[5] ‘Once and for all – and I should dearly love to be able to say “once and for all” – this may perhaps put an end to the accusation that the Collegium pays too little attention to the history of the Germans in the Bohemian lands.’ In Ferdinand Seibt: Collegium Carolinum. Achievements, Tasks, Problems. In: Michael Neumüller (ed.): 25 Years of the Collegium Carolinum Munich. 2nd edition. Munich 2002, pp. 3–16, here p. 3.

[6] Articles of Association, p. 1.

Felix Jeschke: Collegium Carolinum (CC). In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2023. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32841 (as at 28 April 2023).