In the age of digital editions, editorial commentary needs to be discussed anew, especially since in practice the classical commentary on a particular passage appears to be a weak point of digital editions. The expected achievements of digital edition commentary (internal and external networking of the knowledge presented in the commentary; linking with standardised data; subsequent use of older, printed commentaries) are measured against the potential of letter commenting, i. e. the fact that letters comment each other; the connection of paradigmatic lemmas, emerging from registers, with syntagmatic lemmas, readable along the sequence of characters, with a favouring of the former option. While previous digital editions of letters were largely based on a print edition that had appeared either in parallel or in advance, future letter commentaries will further open the boundaries between intra- and extramural knowledge. In this context, Georg Vogeler’s concept of the ‘Semantic Digital Edition’ is discussed at the end.

Early Romanticism in Jena (ca. 1797–1801) constituted a pivotal intellectual network centred around the Schlegel brothers and their wives, Caroline and Dorothea. Amidst war, political fragmentation, and the absence of a political, economic, or cultural centre in the Holy Roman Empire, romantic socialising hardly ever took place in person, but rather by letter, enacting their ideal of “sympoetry” – a shared, ever-approximating pursuit of. The project “Correspondences of Early German Romanticism” is the first to systematically collect, digitize, annotate, and analyse these letters. In this study, we focus particularly on references to works and periodicals in the letter. These mentions are assumed to have a binding and connecting function for the correspondents, negotiating a concept of discourse and building a consensus, namely, which statements are possible and accurate. This knowledge is generated through communication and evaluation and passed on repeatedly.Building on previous Humanities’ network research, this paper therefore addresses how references to works function as vehicles of knowledge transfer and canon formation. We outline our conceptualization of “knowledge” in this context, describe our dataset and bipartite network model (linking correspondents to mentioned works), and present preliminary analyses of static and dynamic network patterns. The paper concludes with critical reflections and outlines future research directions for understanding the role of correspondence in shaping Romantic thought, influence, and reception across Europe and beyond.

If 'Belesenheit' (being widely read) is considered today to be a bourgeois ideal that has long since become anachronistic, this contribution, which argues in terms of discourse theory and praxeology, traces the obsolescence of this virtue in the context of the 1968 movement, specifically in the early history of the then newly established undergraduate course in literary studies. In order to achieve wholeness in a unity of (theoretical) discourse and life practice, the organizers of the entry courses and the authors of the new introductory textbooks leave behind a systematic and far-reaching reading practice in favor of a theory-based reading of individual texts now designated as exemplary, which are admittedly still largely taken from the canon. Primary text reading now has exclusively heuristic value, and often runs only via text excerpts. In the final analysis, the new undergraduate studies – such as the Marburg model – are concerned with the theoretically founded practice of life, no longer with 'education' for the 'gifted' or with an autonomously conceived world of 'poetry'. The paradigm shift is also evident in the explosion of introductory literature for undergraduate study. Unlike Karl Otto Conrady's canon-and-education transitional product of 1966, the sometimes decade-long successful introductions of the 1970s open up to the telos of 'theory and method' and a culture of chunk reading. The question of the (self-)purpose of primary text reading, meanwhile, returns in canon debates, such as around 2000.

After ten years of running (2012–2021) the digital edition of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s correspondence, the project team would like to present the initial situation and the goals, the results and experiences of the joint work as well as share the methodological findings and put them up for discussion. The work packages as well as the workflow will be explained in detail and the working methods will be reflected. The three project partners are presented in equal detail.

Abstract Citizen science, understood as research that includes both specialists and interested laypeople in its work, has, in recent years, become a key concept in debates about the future of scholarly practice. The essay attempts to transfer this approach to the requirements and processes of scholarly editing, especially under the heading of professionalism. It not only analyses the strategies of projects that have succeeded in editing larger amounts of text using crowdsourcing methods, but also explores where the involvement of volunteers or the outsourcing of editorial activities reaches its limit.

In einer Fußnote seiner viel beachteten Fallstudien zum Briefschreiber Goethe hat Albrecht Schöne angemerkt, dass Georg Steinhausens Geschichte des deutschen Briefes die „einzige, immer noch förderliche“1 Geschichte des deutschen Briefes sei. Sie ist, wie Schönes Beistrich zu verstehen gibt, nicht nur die einzige Geschichte des Briefes, die immer noch förderlich ist, sondern die einzige Geschichte des Briefes überhaupt. Angesichts der Intensität, mit der in den letzten Jahrzehnten über den Brief nachgedacht wurde und mit der Briefkorpora editorisch erschlossen werden, angesichts der Tatsache auch, dass die Briefforschung inzwischen ausgesprochen beachtlichen Handbuchstatus2 erreicht hat und damit ins Stadium ihrer Selbstbilanzierung eingetreten ist, ist Schönes Befund eine Provokation. Steinhausens Geschichte des deutschen Briefes stammt nicht nur aus dem neunzehnten Jahrhundert, sondern schließt auch dort: „Meine Darstellung von der Geschichte des deutschen Briefes ist zu Ende: in unseren Tagen durfte am ehesten eine solche versucht werden: denn seine eigentliche Geschichte liegt hinter uns, und es scheint, als ob es mit einer weiteren Entwickelung überhaupt vorbei sei.“3 Tatsächlich ist auch der Briefforschung des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts der Gedanke nicht fremd, dass sich die Geschichte des Briefes im neunzehnten Jahrhundert vollendet hat. „Die Möglichkeiten des Mediums Brief“, so heißt es bei Johannes Anderegg, „sind kurz nach 1800 weitgehend ausgelotet“.4 Diese Behauptung ist zwar nicht unwidersprochen geblieben – Jörg Schuster hat in seiner ambitionierten „Kulturpoetik des Briefs“ den „innovativen Charakter des Briefs in der Moderne“5

Abstract The paper appeals for a re-examination of the digital scholarly edition of letters informed by a ‘theory of practice’ appropriate to a project environment. The genre letter seen as a means of communication and the use of digital media tools are emphasised, the use of which in no way precludes keeping with established scholarly critical edition standards. The ‘behind the scenes’ of the project The Digital Edition of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Correspondence is discussed, as are, in a more universal sense, Bourdieu’s critical ideas of theory and practice as applied to digital letter edition projects and their interests.

Kontrafaktisches Geschichtsdenken provoziert die Entstehung alternativer, dem kulturellen Wissen widersprechender Narrative. Der Aufsatz entwirft am Beispiel von ›Wende‹ und ›Wenderoman‹ ein wissensorientiertes Modell der Leserkognition bei narrativ-fiktionalen Texten, deren Textwelten alternative Geschichtsverläufe ausarbeiten. Auf der Grundlage der Frame-Semantik und der von Fauconnier und Turner vertretenen Theorie des ›blending‹ wird gezeigt, wie Vorwissen und bei der Lektüre erworbenes alternatives Wissen zu einer ›blend‹ verschmelzen.

Abstract Letters as a form of communication gain their meanings not least by performative practices hints of which are clearly shown in their materiality. Vice versa, the paper discusses the possibilities of performing and making a film of correspondences using the example of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann (published 2008) and its film version Die Geträumten (‘Dreamed people’, 2016). The performative aspects of letters may also be represented by audio books or picture books. Yet especially digital letter editions should examine the phatic and conative functions of letter communication supplying specially designed kinds of metadata and their visualizations. The ‚Jenaer Romantikertreffen‘ (‘Jena Meeting of Romanticists’) in 1799 serves as a final historical example.