Peter Handke Notebooks. Digital Edition

The notebooks of the Nobel Prize–winning author Peter Handke constitute a significant body of work that has not yet been published. In a long-term cooperation between the Austrian National Library and the German Literature Archive Marbach, all 75 notebooks produced up to 1990 are being published for the first time in a commented digital edition and made freely accessible. All research data will be archived for the long term and made available for reuse and scholarly inquiry.

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About

The notebooks are Peter Handke’s most important working tool, used to prepare his literary works and to record readings and travels. Starting in 1976, he begins to record a “reportage” of “consciousness events” of all kinds in his daily notes and experiments with new aesthetic techniques that would lead to a turning point in his poetics. This sustained practice of notation, which also includes drawings, renders the notebooks unique documents and indispensable sources for Handke scholarship. Seventy-five notebooks from the period 1971 to 1990, comprising a total of 10,900 densely written pages, are already accessible in public archives.

Edition Project

The digital edition project “Peter Handke: Notebooks” is directed by PD Dr. Bernhard Fetz and Dr. Ulrich von Bülow. It is produced by the Literature Archive and the Department of Research and Data Services of the Austrian National Library, together with the German Literature Archive Marbach, under the editorial management of Mag. Katharina Pektor and a seven-member team.

The digital edition includes the publication of all 75 of Peter Handke’s notebooks on the edition website https://edition.onb.ac.at/handke-notizbuecher (open access). The edition is hosted and archived within the Sustainable Infrastructure for Digital Editions at the Austrian National Library. The project is conceived as a three-part long-term undertaking:

1. Project Phase 1 focuses on developing the edition website, establishing editorial concepts, and editing 22 notebooks from the years 1976 to 1979, which document Handke’s practice in journal writing as well as the development of his film narrative The Left-Handed Woman and the major work complex Slow Homecoming. Phase 1 was carried out between 2021 and 2024 within the projects I 4708 (FWF) and 435049492 (DFG).
2. Project Phase 2 is dedicated to the subsequent 26 notebooks up to 1987; these document the emergence of ten additional works, three films, and the beginning of Handke’s activities as a translator from American English, Slovenian, French, and Ancient Greek. Phase 2 will be carried out between 2025 and 2028 within the projects PIN3302724 (FWF) and 435049492 (DFG).
3. Project Phase 3 publishes the early notebooks up to 1976, in which Handke used a different note-taking technique, as well as the notebooks from 1987 to 1990, which he kept with him during his nearly three-year world journey.

The notebooks are provided in accordance with current editorial standards as philologically reliable, easily readable and citable texts that can be verified against their facsimiles, accompanied by concise commentary and indexing. They are presented in a synoptic view showing the facsimile, a commented diplomatic transcription, a reader’s version, and a TEI-XML view. Comprehensive overview commentaries offer rapid insight into the content and material and allow thematic access to each individual notebook. The project’s outreach and indexing features will be expanded in Phases 2 and 3 and supplemented with new content and itineraries, such as a search function or visualizations of travel routes.

Methods

The workflow combines classical and digital editorial methodologies: editorial concepts, features, and tools are developed and validated collaboratively and in an agile manner by the entire team. The texts are transcribed in Transkribus, and from the second project phase onward, machine-assisted processes such as Handwritten Text Recognition and Named Entity Recognition will be applied. The documents are then encoded in TEI-XML in the Oxygen editor in accordance with current encoding standards and enriched with authority data (GND, VIAF, Wikidata). The TEI documents are versioned and stored via GitLab and integrated into the edition platform.

Innovation

The first publication of the notebooks is a prerequisite for systematic in-depth indexing and interpretation of Handke’s work. It opens up new research questions and insights into his poetics, the intertextuality of his writing, and his specific working methods and processes of textual genesis. With regard to encoding and visualization, new approaches are being explored on the basis of established standards and innovative Digital Humanities research practices—for example, in the handling of drawings, of data relevant to genetic criticism, or of geospatial data.

Project Team

Project lead: PD Dr. Bernhard Fetz (Director of the Literary Archive and Literary Museum of the Austrian National Library) und Dr. Ulrich von Bülow (Head of the Archive Department, German Literary Archive Marbach)

Edition lead: Mag. Katharina Pektor
Edition: Dr. Anna Estermann MA, Mag. Johanna Eigner BA
Edition assistent: Anja Stix MA MA, Linda Dürrwächter MA, Dominik Denk BA
Edition infrastructure: DI Christoph Steindl BSc (Head of the Department Research and Data Service, Austrian National Library), Mag. Martina Bürgermeister MA (Research and Data Services, Austrian National Library)

External staff for the translation of foreign-language text sections and the transcription of shorthand text passages: Univ. Ass. Dr. Ioannis Fykias (Ancient Greek), Prof. Dr. Anna Montané Forasté (Spanish), Ana Grigalashvili / Mag. Manuel Zauner (Georgian), Dr. Helmut Moysich (Italian, French), Mag. Martin Springinklee (Stenography), Dr. Mag. Dominik Srienc (Slowenian), Univ. Prof. Dr. Dorothea Weber (Latin).

Former team members: Dr. Vanessa Hannesschläger (Edition); Mag. Martin Krickl, Mag. Manuela Mayer and Mag. Christiane Fritze (technical implementation, data modelling)

Scientific Advisory Board: Peter Stadler MA (University Paderborn), Dr. Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth (University Wuppertal), Dr. Tanja Kunz (University Bielefeld), Dr. Marit Heuß (University Leipzig)

Funding

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