# TINY_SCHILLER: A Drop-In German Drama Corpus for Small Language Models

> Source: <https://www.machinebrief.com/news/tinyschiller-a-drop-in-german-drama-corpus-for-small-languag-ic32>
> Published: 2026-07-23 04:00:00+00:00

arXiv:2607.19992v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: tiny_schiller closes the small-language-model prototyping, fine-tuning, education, and research gap for German literary text, providing a single-file, drop-in counterpart to Karpathy's tiny_shakespeare. The available German literary corpora are larger and richer, but require parser engineering before a single line of training or fine-tuning code can run. tiny_schiller is a 2.07-megabyte single file of eleven public-domain Schiller dramas, sourced from DraCor's GerDraCor export (CC0) and processed by deterministic parser engineering. Character-level, GPT-2 byte-pair encoding, and cl100k_base tokenization splits, an instruction-formatted dialogue-completion split, and 89 per-character persona splits load from a single HuggingFace call. A small language model literally reaches German literary text in one line of code.
