The corpus “Soldiers' Letters” comprises 170 letters from officers, non-commissioned officers and ordinary soldiers, addressed to their families back home. While all letters are written in German in the period from 1745 to 1872, there is a clear focus on letters from the Coalition and Liberation Wars (1792–1815), the German War (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71). Although the reasons for writing are largely the same, the writing experience of the three rank groups (officer, non-commissioned officer, enlisted men and common soldier) is very different. The corpus thus offers the possibility of examining the entire breadth of historical everyday writing on the basis of a single type of letter.
The corpus “Soldatenbriefe des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts” has been curated and published in the context of Text+.
The repository contains different directories:
attic: contains the original datadata: contains the cureted data as single lettersscripts: contains metadata-files as well as scripts being used during curation
The workflow is documented in detail here: https://github.com/deutschestextarchiv/soldatenbriefe/wiki.
- LandingPage: https://www.dwds.de/d/korpora/soldatenbriefe
- Text encoding: DTA Base Format, TEI P5 XML
- Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0