Learning from the Past: The Case of the Weimar Republic : A Proposal for Historical Analysis, Revision and Digitization

Abstract: In a world in which current events increasingly evoke episodes from the past and former crises, understanding history becomes fundamental in order to build an informed solution strategy. Nevertheless, one should also recognize to leave one’s contemporary judgment and knowledge in the present, while dissecting the past for valuable insights. In this master thesis, I am submitting a research proposal to fellow students and the research community at large, which includes a case study that, firstly, analyses the Weimar Republic’s newspaper landscape and the lack of an extensive and centralized digitized archive of its widely decentralised press, and, secondly, analyses the transformation of language over time in a newspaper sample from the Aachener Anzeiger. Through the analysed sample and analysis, I wish to highlight the importance of understanding the past so that future adversities can be easier resolved by a combination of distant and close reading techniques. The interest in the history of Weimar Germany is steadily regaining momentum within and outside academia, as several contemporary events seem to establish a certain parallel with this short-lived first attempt at democracy that emerged after the end of the former German Empire. In this thesis, history will be analysed through the digital textual analysis of newspapers. The limitations of this approach will be illustrated and discussed, such as the challenges posed by decentralized archival material, the issues OCR encounters when digitizing the Fraktur typeface, and the deriving importance of digitizing such typeface to avoid historical erasure. Furthermore, the need to render such findings and research accessible to society at large is fundamental, as the contemporary political developments of our times affect everyone, whether they belong to academia or not. In the final chapter, new research pathways will be proposed and discussed, while also considering the case of contemporary history and politics and the essential aspects of digitization and social acceleration of life through technology.