Peter Handke Research Platform

Project summary

The project documents and describes the most important sources on the genesis of Peter Handke’s literary works and presents its results on an electronic platform as part of the website of the Austrian National Library. Its point of departure is the extensive collection of materials which Handke has already given to the Literary Archives at the Austrian National Library in Vienna as a pre-mortem bequest. This is the largest Handke collection in the world, and provides detailed documentation of his literary endeavours including working notes, numerous draft versions, typoscripts, manuscripts and accompanying materials (photographs of locations that appear in the works, annotated hiking maps, etc). Original documents and documentary materials on the author’s entire oeuvre – often the cause of controversial debates – are also held at the German Literature Archive in Marbach as well as in numerous other public and private collections. All the sources relevant to the genesis of Handke’s works will be studied, put in relation to one another, and presented in an appropriate form (in data tables, work and source histories and with the use of facsimiles). In this way, a new, source-based foundation will be laid for further and more profound readings of one of Austria’s most significant living authors – both for Handke specialists, who over recent years have increasingly turned to questions of text genesis, but also for an interested general public. The research platform aims to be an open project, supervised by an international scientific board, and offering possibilities for the publication and discussion of individual studies on the genesis of Handke’s works.