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.
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):