The Culture Award follows in the tradition of the German Enlightenment and the Brothers Grimm, whose language criticism and linguistic research aimed to make German accessible to all population classes. It consists of three different awards:

• Jacob Grimm German Language Prize

• German Language Initiative Prize

• German Language Institutional Prize

Linguistic expression of emotions in love letters

The non-monetary German Language Institutional Prize 2024 goes to the Love Letter Archive based in Koblenz and Darmstadt. Its mission is to archive private and authentic love messages. These include not only classic love letters, but also postcards, fax messages and emails, as well as messenger messages and graffiti. It thus documents the wide range of possibilities in German language for expressing emotions and creating close social relationships. „We were also impressed by the fact that this is a fruitful citizen science project,” says Prof. Dr. Wolf Peter Klein, spokesperson for the Culture Award jury.

Love letters and correspondence have been donated to the archive for nearly three decades. In collaboration with the Technical University of Darmstadt, they are being digitised in order to make them accessible to science and society in the long term and to preserve them permanently.

The Love Letter Archive was digitised and indexed as part of aproject funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in cooperation with the TU Darmstadt, the University of Koblenz-Landau, the Rheinische Landesbibliothek Koblenz and the University of Applied Sciences.

• Vollständige Pressemeldung der Eberhard-Schöck-Stiftung
• Love Letter Archive
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