Intertextuality in the Legal Papers of Karl Kraus. A Scholarly Digital Edition

The project Intertextuality in the Legal Papers of Karl Kraus A Scholarly Digital Edition takes as its subject one of the most important representatives of critical modernism, Karl Kraus (1874-1936). Although the legal system was of central significance for Kraus as a writer and publicist, his legal papers have received little scholarly attention. They document over 200 lawsuits over a fifteen-year period (1922-1936) and are held at the Karl-Kraus-Archive of the Wienbibliothek (Vienna City Library). An edition of the legal documents published by Hermann Böhm in 1995-1997 is now out of print. This edition was also incomplete and, in light of new digital editing techniques, no longer state of the art. A full digital edition is therefore a research priority that promises new insights for users from a range of disciplines. The corpus will also complement and expand upon those of Krauss writings already available in digital form. The project has two parts. In the central, first part of the project the legal papers will be digitized and annotated comprehensively for the first time. At the same time, Böhms edition will be digitized and aligned with the original documents. A focus will be on the identification of direct quotations in the texts. In the second part, these direct quotations will be thoroughly examined. Citational practices are fundamental for Karl Kraus and his form of satire, but there has hitherto been no academic account of how this operates in the legal papers. For the analysis of the quotations, the central research question will ask what the practices and strategies of citation looked like in practice. Which witnesses are relied upon and in which ways? How do these quotations relate to those in other texts by Kraus? And can changes be noticed over the course of the fifteen years across which the legal papers stretch, which were politically eventful years for Austria?

In the project Intertextuality in the Legal Papers of Karl Kraus, the legal files of the law firm of Oskar Samek (1889-1959), which concern his most important client Karl Kraus (1874-1936) and comprise approximately 20,000 pages, have been extensively processed in a scholarly digital edition (https://www.kraus.wienbibliothek.at/). It is extremely rare for a lawyer's files to survive as such, and even rarer for them to concern such a central, culturally and politically relevant figure of Viennese modernism. The files, which were compiled between 1922 and 1938, are therefore an extremely interesting source in terms of contemporary, cultural and legal history. This was already evident to Samek himself, who took the files with him into his exile in New York, where he already began to prepare their publication. After his death in 1959, the files were transferred to the Karl Kraus Archive of the Vienna Library in the City Hall. In a four-volume print edition (Hermann Böhm, Karl Kraus contra ... Die Prozeßakten der Kanzlei Oskar Samek, Vienna 1995-1997), which is now out of print, it was not yet possible to analyse the heterogeneous material - bundled in over 200 cases - in such a way that it could be explored in all its complexity. Not least, large parts of the files were missing, the text of which was only reproduced in excerpts or abstracts. The now available meticulous edition opens up entirely new insights into the journalistic, cultural, and political scene of the 1920s and 1930s, in which Kraus's and Samek's legal battles between the First Republic and the National Socialist dictatorship took place, through elaborate coding and contextualisation. Typographical peculiarities and (handwritten) interventions were marked as well as persons, institutions, places and addresses. In line with the central question of intertextuality publications - especially in the Fackel as well as on ANNO and legal texts with reference to ALEX - were coded and linked as such. Six indexes, visualizations of the data (statistics), a handbook with texts by renowned researchers, paratexts, and curated access make Kraus's/Samek's interactions with and in their time tangible and researchable in new ways.