Anyone aiming to do serious research into Germany's pre-WWII archives needs a particular skill: They should be able to read forms of handwriting that have meanwhile completely disappeared from everyday use in the German language. But now, an AI program can do just that.
This cursive script was developed in 1911 and taught in German schools from 1915 to 1941, until it was banned by the Nazis. Even though German speakers who grew up with Sutterlin continued to use it well into the post-war period, most Germans cannot read the letters written by their grandparents.
Documents from the colonial era are particularly interesting, as the German Federal Archives own a collection of around 10,000 files from the Reich Colonial Office. This collection was selected for a project as a focus of coming to terms with the colonial era.
The German Federal Archives have developed a new tool to decode different types of writing found in documents from the colonial era, enhancing the ability to decipher historical materials that may have been challenging for most Germans to read.
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