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

A new 2.07-megabyte single-file German drama corpus, tiny_schiller, provides a drop-in counterpart to Karpathy's tiny_shakespeare for small language model prototyping, fine-tuning, and education. The corpus contains eleven public-domain Schiller dramas sourced from DraCor's GerDraCor export (CC0) and includes character-level, GPT-2 byte-pair encoding, and cl100k_base tokenization splits, enabling small language models to access German literary text with a single line of code.

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.