Peter Handke: Notebooks

The notebooks of the Austrian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Peter Handke, are nothing less than a monumental project in comprehending the world which now encompasses more than 30,000 closely written pages. Seventy-five notebooks dating from the period 1971 to 1990 (10,900 pages) are currently accessible in the German Literature Archive Marbach (DLA) and the Literature Archive of the Austrian National Library (ÖNB) in Vienna. In 2021 the two archives decided to make these holdings, which are in high demand by researchers, accessible to the wider public via the ÖNBs platform for digital editions: https://edition.onb.ac.at/handke-notizbuecher (open access). This represents an extensive first publication: The first 21 notebooks spanning the years 1976 to 1979 are already online; the current project now focuses on the subsequent 26 notebooks that cover the years 1979 to 1986 (3,967 pages). For scholars, the notebooks represent a significant body of work in Handkes uvre. They are not only his most important tool as he prepares his works, develops his poetics, and annotates his own reading and travels. In 1976 he began a rigorous daily practice of recording spontaneous impressions of consciousness of all kinds (although: nothing of a private nature) he calls this his personal epic. The density and diversity of the notes as well as their design with colourful ink and a variety of drawings make the notebooks works of art in their own right and vital sources for Handke scholarship. They are considered indispensable to any serious interpretation of Handkes works: They open up new approaches (in-depth analysis) and facilitate new perspectives and insights on the authors poetics, on the influence of his own reading and travel on his writing, on the biographical contexts of certain motifs as well as on his particular writing methods and the genesis of his works. The editorially challenging texts will be transcribed, edited, and visualized in accordance with current technical and scholarly standards and with the support of the latest technical tools: as philologically reliable, commented, easily accessible and citable texts that can be checked against the facsimile. Concise comments and indices facilitate a variety of approaches to the text and support the user in managing the large volume of pages. The current project now expands the scope of existing publication and indexing tools through innovative research approaches with features such as a search function and the visualization of travel itineraries. All editorial, technical, and graphics-related decisions are documented in detail in the edition guidelines. The Principal Investigators for the project are PD Dr Bernhard Fetz and Dr Ulrich von Bülow. Project implementation by seven researchers; Principal Editor: Mag. Katharina Pektor.