Preparing a literacy of the Third Reich

By March 13, 2016 BlogPost No Comments

Hey everyone!

Being a little bit over-ambitious and slightly determined to put my history-buffness to good use, I decided to focus on literacy in the Third Reich as my project for this class.

I thought that this would be a walk in the park, but I vastly underestimated one thing in particular: the language barrier.

apparently historians haven’t decided to spend a lot of time on the subject of literacy in the Third Reich, so many of the primary source documents of literacy practices in Nazi Germany have been left un-translated from their original German.

So yeah, I’ve spent the better half of the past couple of weeks translating old Nazi Party documents and attempting to teach myself basic, elementary German along the way.

One of the things that I’ve learned from this entire experience is this: never put off large projects until the end (this may or may not be a common theme in the blog posts that I churn out tonight). If you want to transcribe and translate bureaucratic documents ranging from government memos to orders executed in the battlefield, it’s probably best that you either find a German friend or start a little bit sooner in the accumulation of your research.

So on that note, I leave the rest of you to continue onwards with their projects and hopefully be entirely complete with them by the time that you have to present (I envy all of you that made the smart decision to present earlier last week). Looking back now, I also should have made that choice.

See you all tomorrow afternoon, bright and early!

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