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Relaxing I was reading David Pierce’s Installer when I saw a beautiful painting used as the phone background for JA Westenberg: Mors Imperator, with the following description: “She was famously banned from displaying it, and instead rented a house and charged an entry fee to see it. Very punk rock / DIY for the 1800s.”

Intrigued What fun, why was it banned? Was she really punk rock? Was she able to get away with this in the 1800s? Were there consequences?

Disappointed Wikipedia provided the smallest overview of her life. The same quip about Mors Imperator being banned due to Kaiser Wilhelm I was repeated on website after website, but that was all. My desire was unsatiated.

Drawn I have always had a passion for history. Although the vast majority of my studies were focused on the High Middle Ages, I find almost anything to be of interest. Of all time periods of all places I haven’t studied, Imperial Germany is one of the most interesting for me. I had rumors and notes passed down that I was related in some way to the Hohenzollern royal family, through a “Swiss princess”, with specifics about high-ranking ancestry serving under Friedrich III (presumably outside his 99-day reign). At no point have I found even the slightest trace that this story is true for my family, but I am drawn to this time period.

Nerd-sniped I killed an entire Saturday researching this (with many, many more to follow), learning what I could about her and the time period. She was a poet, painter and author, and her German Wikipedia page was much more advanced. In fact she had a large amount of German writing and just nothing in English. In a previous time and place that would largely have been the end. Yet times have changed. I am not constrained by the fact that I do not know German, so I started dumping information into Claude for translations to learn more.

Storage Claude could translate faster than I could read, so I had it start storing everything in an Obsidian vault for me to read later.

HTML When I was ready to read it, I didn’t want to read it in Obsidian, so I had it give me formatted webpages.

Translations Soon I decided I wanted to read her works. So I had it translate her OCRed text.

Confusion Sometimes it didn’t sound right. So I had it line up the German text with the English translation. If something didn’t look right I would try different translation engines to try and get something that was correct.

Re-imaging Sometimes the German text looked bad. The OCR was often old, from decades ago. So I had Claude get the original images and do the OCR again, and then translate again.

Glosses Sometimes it was still confusing, but the translation seemed correct. So I had Claude add annotations to things that don’t translate well to English, or to add context to the things she was saying with glosses on the translation. Learning about the time period through the context of her writing provided a particular endorphin rush to my pent-up historian nature.

Context Sometimes the context Claude provided was clearly wrong, referencing things from the future or that seemed particularly unlikely for her, even as a world traveler, to know. So I had it download and store turn-of-the-century German encyclopedias to use as the primary reference for context.

Investigation I started trying to find what others thought of her. Verification for her autobiography and the events she described. From this Claude downloaded hundreds of newspaper articles about her, her life, her events, her marriages and death. English, German, French, Italian, Austrian, Australian, even Japanese. It is truly an amazing time period to study. Far enough away to be different, interesting, and completely out of any copyright. Close enough to the modern world that there are massive amounts of digital records. However, these digital records are often poor quality, using complicated typefaces, hidden in random archives, and poorly OCRed for search. Poor for search and for humans, but something AI can do easily, given time.

Display With all this set up, I had an Astro site built to better view and analyze all the material, and now to share with others. As far as I can tell none of her writing has ever been translated for English consumption. So I set up all my work to read myself and to share. It almost seems to be providence that I should share the works of Hermione von Preuschen with the world. After 16 years of being domain-squatted, hermionevonpreuschen.com became available the day after I seriously started looking into buying it.

Contact That is how we got here. I hope others can enjoy this work. Contact me at infohermionevonpreuschen.com, or ping me on Mastodon at @sroka@techhub.social or on Bluesky at @burquenobytes.bsky.social.