Volume 29, Issue 1

In 1978 the editors of Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected works presented, under the title Der Fall Franza, previously unknown materials of an incomplete novel as part of the unfinished literary cycle Todesarten. The novel was immediately interpreted as belonging to gender and postcolonial literature; this raised questions about the criteria of the edition of 1978 and finally led to a new critical and genetic edition of the whole cycle, which appeared in 1995. This new edition dug out further drafts and outlines of the novel and offered a chronological reconstruction of Bachmann’s work, basing on the idea of a consequent poetological project. The article not only examines the two different editions, it also uses them as examples of the hermeneutic circle.

The mass digitization of finding aids and original documents from the First World War presents a challenge in developing digital multimedia scholarly editions. Different source categories and media types such as film documents, written records, images and sound can thus be linked, annotated and contextualized. This is illustrated by describing the complex source transmission of three historical events: the submarine warfare in the Mediterranean in 1917, the murder of the Romanov family by the Bolshevik revolutionaries and the cross-border activities and professional life of the Russian born war reporter Samson Chernov (1887-1929) during the Balkan Wars and the First World War.

This paper presents a digital working environment for exploratory analysis of the changes to the text of Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Europeéns dans les deux Indes, a French text from 1770 about the negative influence of European civilization during the colonization of the East and West Indies which was significantly revised in 1774, 1780 and post-mortem in 1820. After a brief summary of the printing history, the features of the environment are presented. Starting with a general map of the corpus by means of a navigation bar and word clouds, the online platform provides users with the opportunity to analyse the text genesis in an exploratory manner. The general map leads the users to text passages of interest with respect to the text genesis. Synoptic representations together with colour markings adaptable to the respective philological problem make the revision history easily comprehensible and the text differences easily identifiable. The approach is, in principle, transferable to scholarly editions of other texts and texts in other languages.

After 1950 several new complete editions of great composers were published, some of them - like Neue Bach Ausgabe or Mozart Ausgabe - replacing the monumenta editions from the 19 th century, some of them dedicated to composers who had as yet not attracted the interest of music philology. Joseph Haydn Werke started publication in 1958; up to now 105 volumes have been published, and the edition will be completed in 2017. Two earlier attempts of complete editions (launched in 1907 and 1950, respectively) failed, primarily due to the complexity of Haydn transmission. Nowadays, all complete editions aim to serve scholarly as well as practical purposes. An important device to achieve this object are practical editions based on the scholarly work, a re-use in the publishing house’s interests, too. But we are far from having practical editions to all the volumes of Joseph Haydn Werke, and they do not always meet the musicians’ requirements.

The most severe criticism of the concepts of our monumental complete editions in music comes from the side of the editors themselves: laments about unpleasant compromises, ideas of ‘open’ or ‘loose leaf editions’, the wish to easily reprint editions with corrections and addenda, or the complaint about the lack of transparency in editorial decisions - all these details contribute to the impression that the function of critical editions will change fundamentally when we enter the digital world. The example of the several editions of Beethoven’s 1st Symphony, which are all based on the same authentic source (printed parts) shows that aspects of the production and transmission process which help to understand editorial problems in general are more interesting than the edited texts. Similar problems appear in manuscripts and the broad availability of scanned sources brings out the question if, on the one hand, we will have to differentiate between graphemes which until now have been summed up under the same notion, and whereas on the other hand we perhaps often tend to be more sophisticated in terms of exactness than coevals. Thus the move to digital editions will promote questions about writing processes in general and will strengthen the role of contextual knowledge. At the same time this contributes to a clear shift of interest - the former ‘edited text’ is no longer the main goal of a critical edition.

In creating a Hybrid Edition of Justine Favart’s and Adolphe Blaise’s Annette et Lubin, a ‹comédie en vaudevilles› that premiered in Paris at the Comédie-Italienne in early 1762, for the OPERA series, the authors explore new ways of editing opera by means of XML/Edirom technology. In the light of Patrick Sahle’s account of edition as hypertext (chapter „Edition als Hypertext“ in Digitale Editionsformen, 2013), the paper focusses on the ‹timbre› indications inherent to the literary text, proposes an understanding of the ‹timbres› that is quite close to what we know as hyperlinks in the age of hypertext, and discusses, from a firmly pragmatic standpoint, the editors’ handling of what one might regard as abundance of hyperlinks. Constructing a historical-critical edition implies, of course, all ‘traditional’ tasks of philological groundwork. But beyond this, today, defining the concept of and programming a vast number of digital links are part of an editor’s core activities: editorially controlled representations of connections inherent to the text, both on the philological, and the historical level.

The article focuses on the fascicle manuscripts of Goethe’s literary estate and investigates different ways of their edition. Goethe usually put letters and papers in a systematic order by himself, filing them in topics relevant to him for further use. For example, among his own manuscripts on scientific issues there are also letters from and to scientists such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Carl Gustav Carus and Leopold Dorotheus Henning that belong to the same topic. However, there are also files compiled by Goethe himself that assemble letters received, diary notes and various other personal documents (i.e. three fascicles that keep records of his third journey to Switzerland in 1797). For a historicalcritical edition, these fascicles are particularly challenging because they are incommensurable with the traditional genres and conventional approaches to editing texts, by chronology and themes. The new Research Project of the Academy’s Programme „Propyläen. Forschungsplattform zu Goethes Biographica“, launched by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig and the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, establishes, for the first time, the basis for creating a complete digital edition, and therefore offers the opportunity to give consideration also to Goethe’s way of compilation.

Editorial work is usually considered to be a specialty for specialists. After having presented editorial problems and results of editorial research to non-expert audiences for more than 25 years I would say, however, that editorial work is more apt to arouse public interest than most other activities in our field. By discussing writing and transmission processes and their impact on the meaning of a text or by showing in detail how texts are interrelated we widen the readers’ horizon and enrich our audiences’ reading experience. Some of the examples I present in this paper are based on numerous discussions with high school students, other examples reflect our editorial contributions to a recent exhibition of Georg Büchner’s life and works. They include manuscript presentations, audio guide talks and a special section with computerized reconstructions of writing processes and intertextual connections. The critics’ response to these editorial contributions was positive and sometimes even enthusiastic.

The exhibition on the complete works of Paul Wühr in the Bibliotheca Reiner Speck (9.11.2014-2.2.2015, Cologne) combined material exhibition strategies with digital presentation culture. The breaking of standards and taboos, transgression of genres and interand intratextuality of the oeuvre were presented both by haptic exhibits in showcases, as well as by their virtual representation within an application on tablet computers. Different offers of sorting, filtering and hyperlinking within the mobile app enabled it to generate multiple secondary orders beyond the static physical order, and opened the exhibition structure towards interactivity.