The linguistic landscape of Schleife can be heard and seen. Its diversity is expressed in the spoken word, in books and manuscripts, in names, through historical personalities, in audio documents, on maps, signs, and dictionaries. The existence of the particular Sorbian language variant of Schleife has been shaping the area in the very Northeast of Saxony for centuries and has given rise to a cultural heritage that can be experienced on these pages.
Digitizing the complete estate of teacher Kito Šwjela (1836–1922) and his son, pastor Bogumił Šwjela (1873–1948), from the holdings of the Sorbian Cultural Archive has made this substantive collection of Sorbian cultural heritage accessible online.
Parallel traditions und sources with different perspectives than those found in the Sorbian Cultural Archive are scattered across various archives and collections. Thus this module was developed, offering an overview of the diversity and importance of these scattered archive holdings.
Knowledge of the old-established minority in both Lusatias has been scattered so far, but is now summarised in the lexicon at hand in its digitized form. More than 200 academic articles give an insight into the current state of research of several arts disciplines.
The autobiographic memoirs of the “Unity of Brethren” from Herrnhut hold a great treasure for Sorbian historical research. They make the everyday life of the Sorbian population in Upper and Lower Lusatia in the Eighteenth century tangible.
The edition at hand contains fifty documents of the Sorbian church in Lübben (which was directly subordinate to the sovereignty) in the margraviate Lower Lusatia. The documents date from the period between 1540 and 1791 and draw a picture of the time of Sorbian Protestant-Lutheran pastoral care in Lübben.
The “Statistika łužiskich Serbow” (Statistics of Lusatian Sorbs, Budyšin/Bautzen 1886) by Arnošt Muka is among the major texts of Sorbian academic journalism in the 19th century. This work of Muka – who is among the protagonists of the movement of Sorbian students – represents the beginning of Sorbian sociology and follows the tradition of older demographic and regional statistics.