The archive – texts and images
The primary source for this work is my private archive. I have collected and kept documents — letters, diaries, calendars, photographs etc. — since childhood. Some of this material may have been lost over the years, but I still have several shelf meters of physical documents kept in an basement room at home (→ archive room).
Since 1986, I have also produced a large amount of electronic documents (text files, emails and digital images), which are now saved on a secure server. Together, the physical and digital archives constitute the empirical raw material for my memoirs (see → versions of my memoirs).
I have also consulted some public archives for information about my childhood and adolesecent years.
For a detailed description of the relevant holdings, see → text documents and → images.
The historical context
Mine is not a ‘life’and-times’-autobiography, but nevertheless I cannot avoid references to the larger social and cultural context of my life. The sources are abundant: there is a lot of printed and online historical literature about the cities and neighbourhoods where I have lived, and local histories about the institutions (schools, universities) I went to and worked in. There are also plenty of useful images available online.
For a further discussion of the historical context and list references to the most relevant sources, see → forthcoming
A section of my basement archive.