Berlin State Library

This article presents preliminary findings from a trinational (German-Mongolian-Czech) research project examining a two-volume, partly handwritten German-Mongolian Index (GMI) compiled in Leipzig in 1927 under Erich Haenisch's supervision, and held since 1964 in the library of the Seminar für Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft Zentralasiens at the University of Bonn. Long attributed largely to Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj—the pioneering Mongolian writer who studied in Leipzig from 1926 to 1929—the index's authorship and scope have remained largely unexamined until now. Marking the 120th anniversary of Natsagdorj's birth, the authors describe the physical characteristics and provenance of both volumes, drawing on the correspondence between Walther Heissig and Haenisch to reconstruct how the manuscript reached Bonn. Using Optical Character Recognition-based digital comparison, the study shows that 81.75% of the 32,479 entries in Isaak Jakob Schmidt's 1835 Mongolian-German-Russian dictionary have a corresponding GMI entry, with very high match quality. Comparative handwriting analysis identifies at least three scribes: Natsagdorj, Haenisch, and, provisionally, Damdiny Pagmadulam. While the GMI's structure and orthography largely follow Schmidt's dictionary, the compilers substantially revised and modernized the material—replacing obsolete terms, grouping synonyms, and adding entries reflecting contemporary European life. These findings indicate that the GMI was not a simple copy but a collaborative, multi-stage effort toward an updated German-Mongolian dictionary for practical use, marking it as a significant milestone in Mongolian lexicography and German-Mongolian scholarly cooperation. This is the first in a planned series of publications from the project's critical, annotated edition.

This is the second part of an attempt of chronicling the history of Manchu studies in the German-speaking areas; the first part was published in a Festschrift for Claus Schönig, professor of Turkology at the Free University of Berlin, in 2015. Manchu studies in the present paper mean publications that are based on or deal with texts in the Manchu language; thus the vast area of material on the history and culture of the Qing dynasty is excluded if Manchu sources are not used. This approach allows to present a relatively detailed although concise survey. The arrangement of the material is more of less chronological by individual scholars whose contributions are briefly characterized. The present instalment is dominated by Walter Fuchs (1902–1979) whose publications easily qualify him as one of the outstanding scholars in the field.

The Stabi Lab, which emerged from a cross-departmental working group at the Berlin State Library, is an umbrella under which data services and information on working with the library’s data can be found, as well as specific training formats for dealing with this data or on methods and tools of the Digital Humanities in general. Projects on working with cultural heritage data are offered in low-threshold, participatory formats; events take place both virtually and in the lab’s own dedicated room, which is to be established as a space for collaboration in the Unter den Linden building. In addition to public events, the Lab also sees itself as a point of contact for data-related research collaborations and as part of the library’s internal exchange and capacity building.