Kármán 2026

Landing page and two illustrated narratives on the Nachlass of Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963). The site is the entry point to the digital edition, the correspondence register, the manuscript catalogue and the Famulus notebooks, and later to further grounding sources on the history of aviation.

Rights

• Originals: California Institute of Technology, Caltech Archives, Theodore von Kármán Collection.
• Digital edition: Gerd Graßhoff (©).
• Author line: Gerd Graßhoff, Universität zu Berlin, Forschungsinstitut am Deutschen Museum. The site is not a publication of the Deutsches Museum. The museum is not the holding archive of the originals.

Layout

build/            uv project: build_data.py, build_site.py, thumbs.py, queries/*.sql,
                  periods.yaml, series.yaml, topics.yaml, places.yaml, sources.yaml
text/nachlass/    chapters of the Nachlass narrative (Markdown, German)
text/perioden/    chapters of the working-periods narrative (Markdown, German)
lektorat/         Lektorat gate reports on the chapter texts
site/             the published static site (own git repository)
  index.html        landing page
  nachlass/         narrative 1: structure and content of the Nachlass
  perioden/         narrative 2: the working periods
  assets/           CSS, JS modules, vendored D3, topojson
  data/             baked JSON aggregates, bundle.js and manifest.json
  img/              facsimile thumbnails

Data sources (read-only)

Build

cd build
uv run python build_data.py     # DuckDB -> site/data/*.json, bundle.js, manifest.json
uv run python thumbs.py         # page images -> site/img/*.jpg
uv run python build_site.py     # text/*.md + data -> site/nachlass, site/perioden

build_data.py opens every DuckDB connection read-only and makes no network or model calls. Every number on the pages is a key in site/data/facts.json; manifest.json records the SQL statement that produced each dataset, its row count and the filter lists (archive boilerplate topics, topic synonyms).

Counting rules

• The 15,976 records of letters are Inhaltseinheiten (letter, note, report, telegram, memo, enclosure, …), not letters. Blank pages are excluded from every count.
• Timelines count dated units only; the undated share is stated with each chart.
• Kármán-Korrespondenz means units in which Kármán (ent_id 8) is sender or recipient. The other units are letters between third parties that lie in his files.
• The PDAI collection covers the boxes 1, 10–13 and 100–132 (1,066 documents). The whole scanned Nachlass has 157 boxes, 4,215 folders and 142,508 scans.
• The series of the box strip are grouped from the folder names (series.yaml); they are not the official series of the Caltech finding aid.

Periods

build/periods.yaml defines the working periods. Each boundary carries a source and a status. proposed boundaries are shown on the site with the mark vorläufig; the current boundaries were confirmed by the author on 28 September 2026. build_data.py checks each boundary against the writing places per year and writes the result to site/data/period_check.json.

Publishing

site/ is its own git repository. It is published only after explicit confirmation.