German Writing in the Modern Era 2900-MK2-NPEN-OG

"By the way, I ask all counsellors, dealing with important affairs of states and provinces, all scholars who have an illegible hand, to have their concepts cleanly written off, for they will see from their own experience how much it hinders their work when they bring them from the archives a fascicle in which they find similarly illegible files" (Philipp Ernest Spiess, Von Archiven, Halle 1777, p. 48). The words of the well-known Hohenzollern archivist are among the pious wishes of archivists and historians, for whom today German grammar is a difficult barrier.
The aim of the class is to provide the basic knowledge and skills necessary for reading German-language sources of the 16th-18th centuries.The source material will be manuscripts from the collections of the State Archives in Gdansk, Poznan and Szczecin, the Landesarchiv and Universitätsarchiv in Greifswald and the Stadtarchiv in Stralsund (photocopies), as well as materials provided by course participants