This paper introduces the digital edition Letters and Texts: Intellectual Berlin around 1800, which is being developed by the junior research group "Berlin Intellectuals 1800–1830" at the Institute for German Literature of the Humboldt University in Berlin. The aim of the edition is to shed new light on literary and intellectual networks in the Prussian capital city around 1800 by making accessible valuable letters, manuscripts, and other documents that have been neglected by researchers. The focus is on writers, scholars, and publishers who contributed to the intense intellectual activity in Berlin around 1800 and whose edited texts afford the reader with a deeper knowledge of their writings as well as their position within the intellectual community of their time. As we developed the concept and the editorial guidelines of the edition, we used it as a basis for the class "Introduction to Digital Humanities" given to master's students in the European Literatures degree program at Humboldt University. Besides introducing students to XML/TEI and other tools to help create their own editions, the aim was to encourage debate on the impact of digital humanities on literary studies. The fact that the digital edition Letters and Texts was still in the process of being developed had advantages as well as some disadvantages for the discussions. In the first part of this article, we present the edition in its current state, the content of the corpora, the encoding architecture, and the planned next steps. The second part describes the way this research structure is being used as a facility for teaching. We also describe how we handled questions and the implementation of suggestions arising from the edition in the classroom. General questions about the role digital humanities plays in literary curricula in Germany and what could be gained from introducing digital humanities classes to a curriculum conclude this paper.