Colonial Traces at the Spree

With funding by the Research and Competence Center Digitalisation Berlin (digiS), the records of the Seminar for Oriental Languages have now been digitized. Among the digitized archival materials are the personnel files of the Lektoren who worked at the Seminar between 1887 and 1942. These documents offer insights into the work of the instructors and the circumstances under which they lived in Berlin. During this edit-a-thon, we would like to explore the stories that can be found in the files concerning the activities of the Lektoren, possible conflicts within the Seminar, or moments of anti-colonial activity.

Work with historical records and close gaps in open data

The fact that Lektoren have received little attention in historical scholarship to date is also reflected in open data services. While entries on German individuals associated with the Seminar for Oriental Languages have so far been prioritized in the Integrated Authority File (GND) and Wikidata, corresponding entries for non-German Lektoren are largely missing. The edit-a-thon “Colonial Traces at the Spree” therefore aims to close these gaps, making new connections between the Seminar and the Lektoren visible and enabling further research into the history of the Seminar’s colonial entanglements.

The records of the Seminar for Oriental Languages, of course, offer only a limited view of the lives and activities of non-German Lektoren in Berlin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As administrative documents of a Prussian institution with a colonial-political mandate, the Lektoren appear primarily through the language and administrative logic of the Seminar. Against this backdrop, we aim to read these documents “against the grain,” following the approach proposed by the historian Ann Laura Stoler.