Hermann Bahr: Austrian Critic of european Avant-garde

Hermann Bahr is a central and programmatic figure of Viennese Modernism around 1900. Recent scholarship has focused primarily on his role as a "cultural mediator," turning its attention less to Bahr`s literary oeuvre than to his numerous essayistic and journalistic texts. However, scholarly work has been impeded by the hitherto incomplete edition of Bahr`s writings. Therefore, the central aim of the research projected is a scholarly publication of Bahr`s collected theoretical and journalistic writings. Directed by methodological issues of translation and cultural exchange, of the interrelations between literary and scholarly Modernity, of transfer and transnational cultural dynamics, it centers on an exemplary literary oeuvre. The project`s most pressing and imperative concern is the reconstruction of this unique archive of currently much-debated European Modernity by intensive research and philologically informed annotations. In this process, a complete inventory of Bahr`s journalistic publications will be compiled and edited for the first time. The dispersed and hitherto not systematically collected journalistic essays, reviews and feuilletons, through which Bahr directed Viennese cultural activity to an exchange on international level are especially apt to outline his role as a cultural mediator and theorist of international Modernity. Additionally, the research project will continue and complete the new edition of Bahr`s Critical Writings in 23 volumes, of which five volumes have already been published since 2004, within the project period. The project will tie together and make accessible in scholarly format those writings crucial for the exemplary reconstruction of Bahr`s function as a "networker" of European scale. Their relevance is based on the fact that an ensemble of his theoretical and journalistic writings will significantly contribute to an extension of our knowledge of Viennese, as well as Central-European, and European Modernism.

The project focused on the critical and journalistic work by Austrian writer Hermann Bahr (1863-1934). His extensive and complex work can be considered an important archive of European Avantgarde between naturalism and the interwar period.Doing archival research we established Bahrs critical and journalistic writings. To make them accessible, we listed them in an online-bibliography containing about 6800 items. A hard-copy of this bibliography will be published by VDG (Weimar) in 2014. Besides, we compiled a bibliography of secondary literature on Hermann Bahr and made a timeline which contains biographic data. In addition, the project-webpage includes an index, a register of correspondence-partners, a picture database, a register of archives which are relevant for Bahr-related research and a list of research-notes.Between 2010 and 2013, we published 23 volumes of a new edition of Hermann Bahrs journalistic and critical texts, both in hard-copies (VDG-Verlag, Weimar) and online. The volumes contain the texts of the first editions, in which the misprints have been corrected, plus an index and translations of foreign-language quotations. The project ended with a conference in Berlin, where international researchers presented papers on Bahrs critical work. These papers will be published at Peter Lang, Bern et al., in 2014.