Parzival

Parzival, written between 1200 and 1210 by Wolfram von Eschenbach, is an Arthurian grail novel in Middle High German. Parzival, by transmission regarded as the most popular courtly novel of the Middle Ages, is based on Conte du Graal (1180-90) by Chrétien de Troyes, the never finished French reference. In Parzival, Wolfram thematically builds on the “classic” Artus novel in the tradition of Hartmann von Aue (Erec, Iwein), but at the same time breaks away from it by introducing the grail theme as an additional religious dimension.

The text comprises approximatively 25,000 pairwise rhymed lines and is divided into 16 books (in modern editions). It is organised into two main plots: the Parzival and the Gawan storyline. Our annotations currently are limited to the first Parzival part (books 3-6): It begins after the parents’ prologue (books 1 and 2) and ends just before the first Gawan part (books 7 and 8). As such, it contains a complete plot unit.

Adorno

The Aesthetic Theory by Adorno is one of the most impactful philosophical aesthetics of the 20th century. It is regarded as the last great aesthetics of the modern era. On the basis of peculiarities of modern artworks, Adorno investigates the status and nature of art, its relation to society, and its utopic core. Because of his sudden early death, Adorno did not finish the Aesthetic Theory himself. The text only exists as a reading edition, initially published in 1970 by his wife Gretel and Ralf Tiedemann.

Currently, annotations are limited to the chapter On theory of artwork which is one of the central parts of the book as regarded by Adorno.

Werther

The Sorrows of Young Werther, written 1774 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is a sophisticatedly structured epistolary novel. This literary form was established during the middle of the 18th centruy in Germany, following the English and French models of Pamela (1740) by Samuel Richardson and Julie ou La Nouvelle Heloise (1761) by Jean-Jaques Rosseau. 1787 Goethe wrote a revised edition of Werther. The modifications comprised a stilistic revaluation of the text, a deletion of excessive sentiment narratives by the protagonist, and the addition of individual letters (swains episode). Our annotations are included in the introductory words of the fictional publisher and the first few letters of Werther directed to his friend Wilhelm, whose responses are contained only fragmentarily and implicitly in these letters. Here, Werther describes a ball event where he gets to know Lotte being engaged.

Plenary Debates

The corpus consists of 1.226 protocols of the plenary debates of the German Bundestag from 1996 to 2015. Every session of plenary debate is publicly accessible online as so-called stenographic report. In CRETA, we use a corpus from the PolMine-research project, headed by Andreas Blätte, in which all individual reports were collected, subjected to various preprocessing steps and integrated into an overall corpus. So far, our annotations are confined to extracts of four plenary minutes. For each of these protocols we annotated one entire speech of a given politician. All statements deal with issues connected to the European Union (accession negotiations with Turkey, European social policy and debates on a European Constitution).