What it does
Deutsches Textarchiv provides collections and corpora of German-language texts spanning different genres and disciplines, including historical printed works.
Use the archive when the wording of an older German source matters, rather than relying on a modern paraphrase. Its corpus approach makes edition and date relevant to a search. Consult the archive’s use conditions for the specific text or dataset before republishing material.
The search tolerates historical spelling variation, and the text/image view lets you compare a transcription with the scan. TEI-formatted text downloads and scan reuse have different rights: the site describes Creative Commons text licenses while image rights usually remain with the holding library.
Best for
- Reading and comparing historical German texts
Sources
- Deutsches Textarchiv (Oct 26, 2026)