The Max Kade Institute is just beginning a long-term project to
preserve and make accessible German-language literature written
in the United States, with an eye toward collecting as much as
possible from a broad range of sources. As a part of this project,
we would like to eventually publish on CD-ROM selected works of
high quality and/or broad interest.
Thanks to our funding from the Consulate through the Friends of the MKI, we
have been able to buy the needed equipment (hardware and software) and to hire
an undergraduate German major, Emily Engel, to prepare sample texts. She scanned
several nineteenth-century texts and has “trained” our Optional Character
Recognition (OCR) software to handle Fraktur, the 
font in which such works were
printed. In addition to a few small texts, we have concentrated efforts on two
longer works. A play, For Mayor Godfrey Buehler by Julius Gugler (written
in German, despite the title) has not only been scanned, but has been put into
modern type using OCR software. It is now a normal wordprocessing file, searchable
and formattable. A collection of poems by Caspar Butz has been scanned, but
not yet subjected to OCR.
After about 1830, millions of German-speaking immigrants arrived in this country, a migration which has significantly shaped contemporary American life and culture. This population was relatively literate and, in the century after this migration, a wide range of literary works were produced across the United States (especially the Midwest, Great Plains, and Texas) in German for this audience. We propose an extensive microfilm collection of such primary texts, to make these extremely obscure and usually endangered works available to generations of scholars.
The planned organization is by genre:
| I. | Drama |
| II. | Poetry |
| III. | Prose |
| A. Short fiction | |
| B. Novels | |
| IV. | Children's literature |
Each volume will include a substantial introductory essay and an index.
Materials will be gathered by first surveying existing scholarship of authors we can identify (as well as Pool’s Index, the American Catalogue, etc.), and then working through the leading journals and newspapers from cities with large German populations.
Participants in the project are Cora Lee Nollendorfs (German, UW; editor Monatshefte), Brent Peterson (German, Ripon College), Louis A. Pitschmann (Assoc. Director, UW Libraries), and Joseph Salmons (Max Kade Institute).
| Back to German-Language Literature in America | Back to Max Kade Institute |
Last updated 7/18/2001.
Please contact Kevin
Kurdylo with comments or suggestions.