Press Reviews

The new digital services, which the Theodor Fontane Archive activated on the 29th of April, 2021, have also met with lively interest from the press. In the Berliner Tagesspiegel, Lena Schneider is enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by the Digital Fontane Chronicle and the Fontane Correspondence Database: »It is not the wealth of data itself that is new. But that it is now digitally available to everyone. – Free of charge«, as Schneider emphasizes. Thanks to the Theodor Fontane Archive, she sums up, »the author from the Mark Brandenburg is now really becoming a ›gläserner Mann‹, completely transparent.«

Sarah Kugler from the Märkische Allgemeine also had great fun »combing through the chronicle«. She praises the uncomplicated handling of the database: »You can click your way ›blindly‹ through individual calendar days or with the help of a specific keyword search. Colored dots give clues to different subject areas; a deep orange, for example, marks entries related to Fontane’s work, light and dark blue stand for letters from or to Fontane.«

The congress Fontane’s Media (1819-2019), hosted by the Theodor Fontane Archive at the University of Potsdam’s Am Neuen Palais campus from the 13th to the 16th of June , 2019, and attended by over one hundred national and international researchers, attracted a broad media response. An preliminary report in the Märkische Allgemeine praised the dual thematic focus of the congress, which addressed »not only Fontane’s media existence« but also discussed »the latest research results that are becoming possible thanks to the current media revolution about Fontane.« In interviews with RBB Kulturradio on the eve of the congress opening as well as in the supplement to the weekend edition of the Potsdamer Neuesten Nachrichten, archive director Peer Trilcke was able to explain the concept of the congress in detail. Marc Reichwein’s whimsical report on the »World Congress of Fontane Research« in Die Welt finally enumerated indications of Fontane’s popularity, such as the three new biographies that were presented in the cultural supporting program of the congress, at a »packed symposium in the Potsdam City and State Library,« and »Trouvailles«: »Just in time for the 200th anniversary of his birth, Wolfgang Rasch, one of the great Fontane experts, caught the newspaper man Fontane at his very first press appearance. For no one had ever before located the birth announcement in 200 years: Rasch leafed through the family announcements of the ›Spenersche Zeitung‹ and presents it in issue 107 of the ›Fontane-Blätter‹.«

The need for information at the beginning of the anniversary year fontane.200 was great and the director of the Theodor Fontane Archive was a sought-after interview partner: On Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Peer Trilcke spoke about Fontane in the media world of the 19th century - of journalistic techniques, the novel in series, and entertainment with several layers of meaning. On RBB Kulturradio he explained, in addition to his institution’s special projects in the anniversary year - above all the congress "Fontane’s Media (1819-2019)" - how the archive is linked with the Institute for German Studies at the University of Potsdam. And lastly, the ZDF morning show featured the archive’s student assistants, who presented the results of their digital analysis of Fontane’s novels.

»Unique«, was the headline of the Süddeutsche Zeitung on the 8th of January, 2019, and on the 18th of January, 2019, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung celebrated Fontane as the »creator of grandiose compound words«. The subject of the enthusiasm were the results of a digital analysis on the hapaxlegomena in Fontane’s novels - on the words, that is, that occur only once in this text corpus - that students of the University of Potsdam had carried out under the leadership of archive director Peer Trilcke as part of the philological hackathon ›The Fontane Code‹. The analysis was printed in issue 106 of the journal Fontane Blätter, co-published by the Theodor Fontane Archive, along with other results of the hackathon, which had taken place at the Theodor Fontane Archive in July 2018. In these composites, according to NZZ author Paul Jandl, »everything is laid out that constitutes the very contemporary originality of the poet. It is the composite called reality that is in these terms. That’s what the Fontane celebrations have to work on first.« In an interview with RBB Kulturradio, WDR 5 and Bayern 2, Peer Trilcke explained the topic himself.

On August 8, 2018, the summer press trip of Brandenburg’s Minister President Dietmar Woidke followed in the footsteps of Theodor Fontane and started at the Theodor Fontane Archive in Potsdam.  In the reports that the numerous journalists produced from the trip in his entourage, the archive also finds due mention, for example in the articles by Wilfried Neiße in Neues Deutschland and by Lars Grote in the  Märkische Allgemeine, who laconically states: »At the Theodor Fontane Archive Potsdam, they know that 2019 will be very busy for them«. Moving pictures of the event were provided by the colleagues from rbb and Potsdam TV.  Finally, Tilman Krause in Die Welt described his participation in the »Landpartie mit Ministerpräsident« in much detail and equal humor.

Analyzing literature with the help of algorithms – the goal of the hackathon held at the Theodor Fontane Archive from the 19th to the 21st of July, 2018 – was met with some skepticism and undisguised curiosity by the press. Even before the event, archive director Peer Trilcke, who had initiated the workshop together with Heike Gfrereis from the German Literature Archive in Marbach, answered questions from both the Märkische Allgemeine and the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, explaining what happens when (as Mathias Richter from the MAZ casually put it) »literary scholars and IT specialists ... take apart the texts of the poet from the Marches.« These explanations were just as convincing to the press as the results presented by the research teams from Basel, Göttingen, Moscow, Potsdam and Stuttgart. A trace of - quite constructive - skepticism remains, however, when the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten report on the final presentation says: »In all their informativeness, the analyses of the scientific teams, which examined an unmanageable amount of literary material in record time, can only provide the impetus for a further engagement with the material, which can then build the bridge from pure numbers to a qualitative examination.«

The change in the leadership of the Theodor Fontane Archive on April 3, 2017, was the occasion for representatives of the press to exchange views on the archive. Tilman Krause of Die Welt, Karim Saab of the Märkische Allgemeine, and Sarah Kugler of the Potsdamer Neuesten Nachrichten met with the retiring archive director Hanna Delf von Wolzogen and the new archive director Peer Trilcke at the Villa Quandt in Potsdam. In addition to looking back on the past 21 years, the focus was mainly on the future and, in particular, on the question of how »the archive is now powerfully gearing up for the Fontane Year 2019, in which the 200th birthday of the Neuruppin native is to be celebrated in a big way« (Die Welt).