Volume 38, Issue 1

The article focuses on editions of poetry from the prae-Gutenberg galaxis, coined by a doubled transformation process. The first transformation took place when such old texts were written down in (mostly medieval) manuscripts. The second transformation is the modern edition of the texts, based on the extant manuscripts. Modern philological debate suffers from the fact that it is concentrated on this second transformation, which is nowadays mostly seen as problematic, while not taking into account that even the supposedly ‘authentic’ manuscript transmission implies a sometimes even harsh alienation from what might have been the original state of a poem. From the perspective of scholarly editing, we are confronted with the question of which texts we constitute when relying on the principle of ‚Überlieferungsnähe‘, and if there is, as was the belief of editors of the ‘long’ 19 th century, a way back behind the transmission. Examples are taken from the German lyric poetry of the 12 th and 13 th century (‚Minnesang‘).

This article explores the challenges involved in editing medieval Shrovetide plays (‚Fastnachtspiele‘). These texts blur the distinction between performance scripts and texts intended solely for reading. This ambiguity complicates the editing process, necessitating a delicate balance between ensuring interpretive flexibility and making pragmatic decisions about whether to delve into the original performance intentions behind a manuscript. The article highlights the crucial role of considering performance dynamics, especially when dealing with texts that contain gaps implying unspoken stage actions. Rather than attempting to fill these gaps, the focus should be on marking them within the edited text.

Kant’s Critique of Judgement ( Critik der Urtheilskraft ) is being republished as part of the so-called Academy Edition. The text itself presents far fewer editorial challenges than other writings of Kant. However, this third critique contains an unusual number of examples whose sources and historical contextualisation in the contemporary discussion are the actual challenge of this edition. Last but not least, there is also the question of how to deal with the devaluing and in some cases racist statements in these examples in the context of the edition.

For a long time, the editorial presentation of Alexander von Humboldt’s œuvre did not do justice to its significance. Only after the publication of the collected papers, articles and essays (2019/21) has it become possible to assess the transformations between his non-book publications and his larger works: Humboldt’s books emerged from his smaller writings and his contributions to journals and periodicals. They were often not conceived as autonomous mono graphs but were made up of various elements that the author processed in fragmentary and polyphonic forms into poly graphs. Based on this conception of his transformative method of writing and publishing, Humboldt’s Kleinere Schriften , a self-curated collection of his own texts, can now be edited for the first time, complementing the first volume, published in 1853, with the second, whose unpublished manuscripts and proofs are preserved in Berlin and Krakow as well as in the archive of his publisher Cotta in Marbach.

The article outlines the historical and current framework conditions as well as various guiding principles of the editorial practice of Sorbian literature. Three phases can be identified: the end of the 19 th century, the 1960s/70s and the present day. This perspective can identify various areas of tension that have determined editorial activity from the outset, but which are weighted differently in the individual phases and accordingly influence the conception and realisation of the editions. The discussions held here offer important starting points for further theoretical and practical considerations in the field of Sorbian studies.

The notes On the concept of history (1940) are considered Walter Benjamin’s philosophical legacy. They were first published in a private print (1942) by the ‚Institut für Sozialforschung‘ (Institute of Social Research, Los Angeles). The narrative of the origin of this publication, which is still widely used today, is based on the assumption, that this edition represents an unknown and lost original by Benjamin himself. In contrast, this article attempts to show that the printed version is very close to the existing typescript T 2 . It was probably created by combining this typescript with some reflections from the oldest manuscript M HA . The important first print with appendix A and B therefore does not represent an authentic version or a simple ‘transcription’, but in all probability an editorial construction by the first editors. This gives reason to reflect on the fundamental tension between preservation and appropriation in the history of scholarly editing, not only with regard to Walter Benjamin.

Early born-digital texts from the 1980s and 1990s are increasingly becoming subjects of cultural transmission. Their scholarly editing requires textual criticism on multiple levels. These texts often exist in multimedia, performative environments, and their ephemeral surfaces necessitate the inclusion of underlying logical structures in textual analysis. Both aspects could be incorporated into synoptic forms of scholarly editing in the future. This is illustrated through the example of disk magazines, a type of multimedia electronic periodical from the home computer era.

The rapid evolution of web technologies presents a challenge regarding the long-term usability of digital editions. Besides graphical web presentation layers, programming interfaces can be considered as a provision layer of such an edition. In this context, the paper investigates the roles that some special formats can play as intermediaries between project-specific data models and interconnected digital resources, specifically highlighting the potential of pivot formats and BEACON. By exploring the dependencies on formats and software for data generation, transformation, and analysis, the paper argues that additional machine-readable formats can improve the durableness and interoperability of digital editions. Regarding sustainability of digital editions in terms of accessibility and usability, however, technical, scholarly, and economic factors must also be taken into consideration.

The presence of the digital is closely linked to the expectation that work processes will be made easier and faster. Considering the barely recognizable increase in speed in editing projects, this article deals with the potentials and challenges of digital tools and processes which, at least in theory, have the potential to speed up editing processes by transferring tasks to the machine that would otherwise be carried out by humans. Using the examples of optical character recognition, handwritten text recognition, named entity recognition and LLM-based dialog systems (AI-based chatbots), the article examines what is associated with the integration of such digital methods and tools into the editing workflow and to what extent the work and transformation processes and, in particular, the roles of human editors and their specific tasks change.

The paper examines the development of Hans Zeller’s editorial views, focusing on the adaptation of semiological structuralism, especially his attempts to frame texts as ‘systems of signs’. Zeller suggests that even a single variant constitutes a new version („Fassung“). While being an influential centerpiece in the development of Zeller’s theoretical views up to the mid-1970s, his application of structuralist concepts to editorial theory is fraught with difficulties. Specifically, Saussure’s notion of the systemic character of language (‹langue›) is not applicable to single texts . Zeller’s claims to this effect are not supported by either Miroslav Červenka, whom Zeller most prominently cites, or by the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. The problem of establishing and justifying a viable notion of text versions for editorial theory remains unresolved up to this day. Zeller’s temporary commitment to theory (specifically to semiological structuralism) may even have inadvertently undermined the project to build a shared editorial methodology.

This article discusses the potential of Gunter Martens’ model of textual dynamic (‚Textdynamik‘) for further approaches, specifically Jerome McGann’s social text theory and Dirk Van Hulle’s model of a dynamic facsimile in the context of born digital documents. Two hypotheses are central to this: 1) On a theoretical level, Martens’ model makes it possible to establish comparability between different theories of text from different ‘schools’ of editing and thus promote further theory-building processes. 2) On a practical level, such a model of textual dynamic can be used particularly well for the editing of modern literary texts, which are characterised as open and incomplete.

The conditions under which historical-critical editions are created depend on technical, scientific and social factors. The emergence of digitality in the humanities in recent decades has contributed to a change in scholarly editing that is not welcomed by all sides. The article therefore uses exemplary editions to examine the supposed contrast between digital and analog editing and attempts to demonstrate that the editorial approach always depends on the subject matter.

The article critically relates Heiner Müller’s publication strategies on the one hand and considerations on his conception of his work, his writing processes and his text production on the other hand. Thereby, the following remarks are intended to show that Müller’s statements about his ‘work’ on the one hand and his writing procedures and text production on the other hand cannot be reconciled. A critical edition of his texts must therefore decide whether it attempts to do justice either to Müller’s understanding of authorship and work or to his writing practice. This contradiction is clarified by means of three categories that have been profiled at least since the publication of Gunter Martens’ and Hans Zeller’s important anthology Texte und Varianten ( Texts and Variants ) more than 50 years ago. The focus is on ‘chronology’ (‚Chronologie‘). In addition, ‘layering’ (‚Schichtung‘) and ‘correction’ (‚Korrektur‘) are considered.

This article aims to re-examine a question originally posed by Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth in 2015 (see note 1): “How are (historical-)critical editions of German speaking authors (from the early modern period onwards) used for literary interpretation in recent German literary studies?” Nutt-Kofoth gave an answer by collecting data from research articles in the traditional periodicals Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie , Euphorion and Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte . He was able to draw up a statistic with rather disillusioning results. Several years later, his statement that little is known about the user group of (historical) critical editions still holds true. A new gathering of data from the same periodicals (with a slightly different approach due to the smaller amount of examined articles) shows new and different results, therefore making the time-span of 2000–2013 comparable with that one of 2014–2020. The aim of this article is to raise awareness of the use of editions in German studies and at the same time to draw attention to the problem of data collection.