Peter Handke Notebooks. Digital Edition

The notebooks of Peter Handke represent an important but so far unpublished part of his work. They do not only provide insights into the author’s writing methods, but also allow to follow the development of his poetics. 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 Marbach and the Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library in Vienna. The notebooks are not only Handke’s most important working materials, by means of which he prepares his works, develops his poetics, notes readings, and logs travels. In 1976, he additionally 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. In this digital edition, 22 notebooks written from 1976 to 1979 will be published. They document Handke’s first practice in journal writing but also the development of his film narrative “The Left-Handed Woman” and the large work complex “Slow Homecoming”.

The project is implemented in the Sustainable infrastructure for digital editions at the Austrian National Library. The team applies current standards for digital editing (XML/TEI), works with appropriate technologies (Transkribus, Oxygen, GitLab) and enriches the material using external data sources (GND, VIAF, Wikidata). The resulting edition will not only be accessible in a user-friendly web interface in which a number of indices and adequate annotation will facilitate navigation and comprehension. In addition, all research data will be archived in a long-term repository and openly provided for reuse.

The cooperation project is jointly funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the German Research Foundation (DFG).