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Universität Mannheim Universitätsbibliothek Mannheim

German Imperial Gazette and Prussian Official Gazette

The Deutscher Reichsanzeiger und Preußischer Staatsanzeiger (German Imperial Gazette and Prussian Official Gazette) was a newspaper, that appeared presumably until April 14, 1945 and acted as official organ of the German Empire and the state of Prussia. The history of the paper reaches back over several predecessors with other titles in the Empire and Prussia to the initial issue which was released on January 2, 1819:

  • Allgemeine Preußische Staats-Zeitung, 1819,1 (2. Januar) – 1843,179 (30. Juni)
  • Allgemeine Preußische Zeitung, 1843,1 (1. Juli) – 1848,119 (30. April)
  • Preußischer Staats-Anzeiger, 1848,1 (1/3. Mai) – 1851,179 (30. Juni)
  • Königlich Preußischer Staats-Anzeiger, 1851,1 (1. Juli) – 1871,116 (2. Mai)
  • Deutscher Reichs-Anzeiger und Königlich Preußischer Staats-Anzeiger, 1871,1 (4. Mai) – 1918,267 (9. November)
  • Deutscher Reichsanzeiger und Preußischer Staatsanzeiger, 1918,268 (12. November) – 1945,49 (14. April)

The successor in the German Federal Republic is the Bundesanzeiger (Federal Gazette). You find on this site all digitized issues from 1819 to 1945. This publication platform is still under development though and can be updated at all times.

1. Digital edition

Since 2015, the provisional edition has offered digitized microfilms for the entire publication period of the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger and its predecessor newspapers.

From 2019 to 2024, a new digital edition of the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger (May 1871 to April 1945) was created with funding from the German Research Foundation. It is freely usable as part of the Digital Collections. In this new edition, most of the pages from 1900 onwards and some of the earlier volumes have been rescanned in color with high resolution, correcting gaps and other deficiencies in the microfilming. The ongoing improvements will also be accessible in the German Newspaper Portal a maximum of three months later, as will the newly created full texts in better quality.

Document structure cataloguing, additional digitization and OCR generation of the Deutsche Reichsanzeiger und Preußische Staatsanzeiger  (1871-1945), project 422758594

2. Searchable full text

Mannheim University Library creates a searchable full text for all issues using the Tesseract software for text recognition and the hOCR format. Automated text recognition in historical newspapers which are printed with Fraktur types is a difficult and time consuming task. Our text recognition took about six years processing time (72 processes running simultaneously for one month). The result is useful for searching, but in most cases not good enough for reading. We are working on an improved text recognition based on newer versions of Tesseract.

3. Origin and further information

The published digital issues originate as a side product from a legal history research project that aims at building a historic bankruptcy database at the Lehrstuhl für Bürgerliches Recht, Rhetorik und Europäische Rechtsgeschichte of the University of Mannheim (Prof. Dr. Ulrich Falk). The creation of the digital edition was made possible with the financial support of the Verein zur Förderung des Zentrums für Insolvenz und Sanierung an der Universität Mannheim e.V. (digitization) and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung (improvement of metadata). Additional issues were scanned from paper volumes that Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen has provided freely from their well conserved collection.

Further information about the creation, content and characteristics of the digital edition are available in a project report (German with an English abstract):

Christoph Kling, Deutscher Reichsanzeiger und Preußischer Staatsanzeiger : Einleitung zur Veröffentlichung der Digitalausgabe, Mannheim 2016.