Peter Handke´s Notebooks

The notebooks of the Austrian author Peter Handke, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2019, represent an important but so far unpublished part of his work. At present 75 notebooks from 1971 to 1990 with a total of 10.900 tightly written pages are accessible to researchers in the German Literature Archive in Marbach and the Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Handkes notebooks rank among the most frequently requested documents of these archives. They served Handke to prepare his literary work, develop his poetics and keep track of his reading and journeys. In 1976 he began his daily log recording all kinds of impressions. His unceasing daily note-taking, together with many drawings, make the notebooks unique documents and an indispensable resource for Handke researchers. The notebooks are recognized as one key to any reliable interpretation of the authors work. This joint project of the two most prestigious literary archives in the German speaking area aims to merge the distributed notebooks into a single digital edition with a user-friendly, appealing layout and to make them available to an interested general public via an open access web interface. The first step is to publish the 22 notebooks up to the year 1979 that document Handkes first practice in journal writing but also the development of his film narrative The Left-Handed Woman and the large work complex Slow Homecoming. It will provide philologically verified, easy-to-read transcripts as well as access to the digital facsimiles. In addition, a short but informative commentary and biographical contextualization will be supplied. Because of the enormous amount of text and the density of information it has so far been impossible to evaluate the notebooks in detail. The digital edition will enable uncomplicated, location- independent and effective research. According to current digital standards all texts will be encoded in TEI XML in order to enable additional features such as an index of mentioned persons, institutions, works, dates and time periods and full text search. The edition will provide revealing new insights into Handkes poetics, the influence of his reading on his literary work, into the biographical impact on his literary motifs and his specific practice of working and writing. It will be the foundation and the first component of any future critical edition of his works. The edition aims to be an open project, providing all data generated in the project under open licenses to interested researchers (XML text files, editorial reports), while the author`s copyright on the texts edited remains active. The publication of the edition in the digital edition infrastructure developed and hosted by the Austrian National Library in Vienna guarantees the long-term preservation of the data as well as the future maintenance and sustainability of the web interface.

PETER HANDKE: NOTEBOOKS An annotated critical digital edition https://edition.onb.ac.at/handke-notizbuecher The notebooks of the Austrian Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke form a largely unpublished oeuvre. For decades, the author recorded daily what he experienced in his different places of residence and on numerous journeys: Perceptions, thoughts, dreams as well as excerpts from his readings or ideas for his own works come together to form a chronicle of even the smallest incidents. These "reportages" of "events of consciousness", also in the form of drawings, begun in March 1976 and give an impression of the author's writing process. They make the notebooks unique documents and indispensable sources for Handke research. To date, a total of 75 notebooks from the period from 1971 to 1990 (approx. 11,000 pages) have been made available to the public in archives. The first 21 notebooks (March 1976 to November 1979, 2,989 pages in total) can now be viewed online via the digital edition PETER HANDKE: NOTEBOOKS. The edition is the result of the international cooperation project between the Literature Archive of the Austrian National Library and the German Literature Archive Marbach (2021-2024), funded by the FWF and the DFG. In addition to the digital edition, one notebook from 1978 was published as a print edition by Suhrkamp. The digital edition combines the holdings of both archives, making them freely available to the widest possible reading public regardless of time and place. The synoptic view enables a comparison of high-resolution facsimile, diplomatic transcription, edited reading version or TEI-XML view. The edition thus offers reliable, easily readable and citable texts that can also be checked against the original. Indexes (places, persons, works), overview and specific commentaries as well as various thematic entry points into the notebooks help to interpret and contextualise these extensive, dense and heterogeneous texts. The edition was realised in accordance with current technical standards within the sustainable infrastructure for digital editions at the Austrian National Library, thus creating the conditions for computer-aided in-depth analysis and interpretation of Handke's work and for a genetic-critical edition of his works. All research data will be archived for the long term and will be openly available for subsequent use. The first publication of these notebooks is a prerequisite for the consistent interpretation of Handke's work. It enables new questions and insights into poetics, intertextuality or specific writing methods. Handke developed and tested new aesthetic procedures in his notes. In addition to its academic use, the digital edition also offers a wide audience, for example in schools, new methods of (digital) literature education and an innovative introduction to the work of the Nobel Prize winner. The edition of further notebooks is planned as part of follow-up projects.