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of the Austrian author Peter Handke, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2019, represent an important but so far unpublished part of his work.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.

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