Joint project of Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz receives EUR 750,000 in funding
19 October 2017
Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) is considered one of the most important authors of German literary modernism with strong ties in the avant-garde of literature and theater of the time. The Editions- und Forschungsstelle Frank Wedekind (EFFW), a joint project of Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) dedicated to the scholarly editing and researching of Wedekind's oeuvre, has managed to collect a corpus of some 3,200 mostly unpublished letters to and from Wedekind. These will be the basis of an online edition of all the writer's correspondence, annotated with commentaries and facsimiles. The German Research Foundation (DFG) will support the project, providing funding of EUR 750,000 over an initial period of three years. The project will be launched in 2018, 100 years after the author's death.
The projects aims at creating an online critical edition of the letters to and from Frank Wedekind, which together with the already complete critical print edition of Wedekind's works will make it possible to establish connections between the author's creative work and his correspondence. The technical features of the correspondence database, which is already available online in a beta version, are being designed by Professor Uta Störl of the Department of Computer Science at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. "This online full text edition is a complex information system, but at the same time easy to use thanks to the incorporation of numerous tools designed to facilitate research," said Störl. Users can search for correspondence by sender or recipient, sort letters chronologically, filter by person, location, or event, and even get the system to identify links between works and correspondence.
Database will promote critical research on Wedekind and his work
The editing research work of the DFG-funded collaborative project is being supervised by Professor Ariane Martin of the German Department at Mainz University. This involves processing the available letters, postcards, and even telegrams, which have to be evaluated, transcribed, and annotated before they can be entered into the database. "Together with the print edition of Wedekind's works, the letters to and from Wedekind form an important material basis for academic analysis of his life and work," emphasized Martin. "When you take into account the particular nature of the letter format, this correspondence is also relevant to biographical historiography, both for those interested in letter-writing around 1900 and those conducting research into the fin de siècle period between 1880 and 1918."
Preliminary work on the joint project was carried out in recent years by Professor Hartmut Vincon of the EFFW at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. This chiefly consisted of looking into Wedekind's extensive exchange of letters, including correspondence with prominent contemporaries such as Otto Julius Bierbaum, Gertrud Eysoldt, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and Walther Rathenau. The new system architecture designed for the database by Professor Uta Störl has also already been implemented in previous years. In 2015, the EFFW relocated to Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz with a focus on literary research headed by Professor Ariane Martin.
Over the course of the three-year funding period, a large proportion of Wedekind's letters – particularly the briefer correspondence – will be made available in the database. In case of additional funding for a further two years, it will be possible to make the entire body of correspondence available online.