Wilhelm Hanstein, Schachzeitung

Continuing with a recent post, Berliner 'Schachzeitung', I wrote,

I discovered that various 19th century chess periodicals were available via Google Books. My first effort concentrated on 'Schachzeitung', which, according to Di Felice's 'Chess Periodicals, 1836-2008', was published during 26 years.

There is such an enormous amount of material in these 'Schachzeitung' volumes that I can do little more than examine an occasional curiosity. For example, the image below left shows one of the first pages in volume 5, 1850. The signature says, 'W.Hanstein'. The image on the right is the first page of his obituary. I've done so little work on this particular volume that I'm not even sure in what month the obituary was published. Based on the PDF page number (which is p.337 in the original volume) and on other visual clues, I guess it's the first page of the November 1850 issue.

Schachzeitung [v05; 1850], PDF p.8 & p.359

In Wilhelm Hanstein, Wikipedia informs,

Wilhelm Hanstein (3 August 1811 in Berlin – 14 October 1850 in Magdeburg) was a German chess player and writer. Hanstein was one of the Berlin Pleiades. He helped found Berliner Schachzeitung, later to become Deutsche Schachzeitung. He was a civil servant.

Those are the first three of the five sentences on the Wikipedia page. Hanstein's obituary in Schachzeitung is 13 pages long.

What does the obituary say? My knowledge of the German language isn't sufficient to translate the original text, so I turned to some aids. First I ran the initial paragraph of the PDF scan through an OCR conversion. Then I ran the OCR output text through Google Translate. Here's what I got:-

A hard blow hit us! - As in the narrower
circles of friends, so also in the common fatherland,
yes we can say in Europe and over the ocean, the
news of this loss in each of the great master,
knew the sensible poet, the deepest conscience
he egen.

To facilitate comparison, the line breaks correspond to the original German text. The paragraph makes some sense until the last line, where the phrase 'er egen' is translated as 'he egen'. In fact, 'er egen' is undoubtedly a single word where the third letter is missing from the PDF scan. For some reason, missing characters occur frequently, not only in the Schachzeitung scans, but in other scans that have nothing to do with chess. Add this to the (long) list of things that can go wrong with digitized documents. Also add 'Pleiades' to the list of topics for future Schachzeitung posts.

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Later: Re 'I guess it's the first page of the November 1850 issue', if I had checked the table of contents, which is separated into months, I would have seen that the obituary was the first page of the October 1850 issue. I excluded this possibility because Hanstein died 14 October 1850. He was only 39 years old.

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Even later: Re 'missing characters occur frequently', some time after writing this I realized that the missing characters happen when I view the PDF document using an Amazon Kindle. The Adobe Acrobat PDF reader does not exhibit the problem.