CorGeS: The Corpus of German Suicide Notes

Abstract

This paper introduces CorGeS, a historic corpus of authentic German suicide notes written between the 1910s and 1930s. Originally compiled and transcribed by a police officer, the corpus offers a rare and valuable resource for both linguistic and historical inquiry. We describe the provenance and structure of the corpus, as well as the methodological and ethical considerations involved in working with such sensitive material. While suicide note analysis is well established in English-language research, German-language material remains understudied, making CorGeS an important contribution to multilingual and cross-cultural perspectives in suicide note analysis. To illustrate the potential of the corpus, we present a preliminary topic modelling analysis, highlighting key thematic patterns in the texts, before using corpus methods to explore the most prevalent item in the corpus in more detail. These early results demonstrate the diversity and emotional complexity of the notes and suggest several avenues for further research at the intersection of linguistics, history, and suicide note analysis.