Johann Pezzl´s ´Skizze von Wien´. Historic-critical Edition

This research project edits and annotates the Sketch of Vienna published by the Enlightenment writer Johann Pezzl between 1786 and 1790. The aim of the text, which was initially published in six issues and reprinted several times up to 1803, was to provide a continuous social and cultural characterization of what was then by far the largest city in the German-speaking world and the third largest city in Europe, inspired by Louis-Sébastien Mercier`s Tableau de Paris (1781-1789). In this respect, this text can be considered the first programmatic description of a large city in the German language. At the same time, the Sketch is an important document of the Josephinian Enlightenment, which, in contrast to the mostly small-town Enlightenment of northern and central Germany, is presented as a decidedly urban phenomenon from Pezzl`s perspective. The only new edition published to the present day dates from 1923 and reproduces the individual chapters of the historical text regrouped and normalized according to systematic aspects. In contrast, the planned edition will follow the first edition orthographically as well as macro- and microstructurally, thus making the Sketch of Vienna available for the first time in its original historical form and arrangement. According to the established standards of editing and textual scholarship, the arrangement of individual sections in historical printed products is never contingent, but in this case must be regarded both as a diachronic document of four years of critical observation of the city and as the result of a deliberate Enlightenment design policy. The historical text is indexed by automatic text recognition (OCR) using the Transkribus platform, which, thanks to the switch to AI-based processes, already has a very low susceptibility to errors when digitizing historical printed matter in Fraktur script. The innovative nature of this edition is due, on the one hand, to the provision and philologically accurate treatment of a historically unique text that has long been unavailable on the book market and has hardly been the focus of literary and cultural studies research, and, on the other hand, to the detailed scholarly commentary that contextualizes this historical text in terms of literature, culture, discourse, media and social history in line with the current state of research. Only a textual reproduction of the Sketch of Vienna based on the first edition makes it possible to comprehend the book, which was initially published in six individual issues, as the product of an ongoing critical examination of the city of Vienna as it changed over the years during the reign of Joseph II under the premises of the Enlightenment.