Baltische Briefe

The “Baltische Briefe” (Baltic Letters) is a historical newspaper that served as an important platform for the Baltic German community, especially after their resettlement during and after the Second World War. The newspaper documented the experiences, culture and heritage of the Baltic Germans and provided a link to their ancestral homeland in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It became an important medium for preserving cultural identity and sharing historical narratives within the diaspora. To this day, the newspaper continues to be a resource for the understanding of the cultural and historical context of the Baltic Germans.

For the development of the corpus, issues from the years 1949, 1950, 1988, 1991, and 2004 were selected for the corpus. These specific years were chosen because they represent critical moments in the history of the Baltic Germans. The 1949 and 1950 issues reflect the early postwar period and the beginning of the Baltic German diaspora's efforts to preserve its cultural identity. The 1988 and 1991 issues capture the cultural awakening and geopolitical changes associated with the independence of the Baltic states from the Soviet Union. The 2004 issue marks a new chapter with the Baltic States' integration into the European Union, symbolizing a reconnection with broader European identity and politics. Analyzing these years helps to illuminate shifts in cultural identity and historical memory during significant periods in Baltic German history.

The corpus is annotated for:

• parts of speech and morphology (Universal Dependencies)
• syntax (Universal Dependencies)
• named entities (NameTag) with locations that include coordinates and a reference to wikidata

The corpus was compiled by Anna Baryshnikova with the technical support of the Institute of the Czech National Corpus and the financial support of the CLS INFRA Translational Access Fellowships scheme.