UNESCO certificate „Memory of the World“

"As mayor of the former "Queen of the Hanseatic League" and as President of the Union of Cities THE HANSA, I am very pleased about this occasion. (...) The entry in the UNESCO register, which we are celebrating today, is both an honor and an obligation. It is about safeguarding the documentary heritage from loss of memory and destruction and about the endeavor to enable access to these culturally significant and historically important documents. I see the "charm" and one of the reasons for the success of the nomination application in the international approach in particular: The Lübeck initiative has been in the spirit of the Hanseatic League from the very beginning - acting together across borders," explained President Jan Lindenau.

The UNESCO Executive Board in Paris decided in May of this year to include the documents in the MOW. A total of 17 individual documents and collections on the history of the Hanseatic League were included in the MOW register - in addition to items from the German Hanseatic cities of Lübeck, Bremen, Hamburg, Braunschweig and Cologne, documents from Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia and Poland were also included. The initiative for the UNESCO application came from the Lübeck archive team in 2015.