Correspondence Edition
»Are there any more? They should be published!« Thomas Mann’s appeal in his review of the Freundesbriefe published from Fontane’s estate in 1910 did not go unheard. But despite mammoth achievements such as the Hanser Edition completed in 1994 - with around 2,500 annotated letters, still the largest collection of Fontane letters - as well as several individual editions, such as the correspondence with Bernhard von Lepel or Theodor Storm edited by Gabriele Radecke, a complete critical edition of the letters by and to Fontane is probably the most urgent desideratum of research.
Image: TFAThe Theodor Fontane Archive holds the most extensive collection of original letters by and to Fontane as well as letters from third parties relating to Fontane and is the only public institution to continuously expand this collection by acquiring letter corpora and individual letters. In addition, the archive preserves handwritten and typewritten copies of numerous letters by Fontane, which were produced by his son Friedrich’s publishing house for the early editions of letters and which represent the only textual witnesses in the case of lost or missing originals.
Based on these extensive holdings, the Theodor Fontane Archive is planning an edition of all letters by and to Fontane that meets academic standards and will be made available to users and readers as an online edition. For the edition, all letters are to be critically edited according to the sources and made accessible through extensive commentary. Particular attention will be paid to the often complicated provenance history of the text carriers.
The Theodor Fontane Archive organized the conferences »Fontanes Briefe ediert« (2013) and - together with the Theodor Fontane Gesellschaft - »Fontanes Briefe im Kontext« (2014) in order to provide a synopsis and critical evaluation of the editorial efforts made to date on Fontane’s letters and to explore the demands placed on the planned letter edition by both Fontane researchers and editorial scholars. The anthologies with the contributions to the conferences have been published in the Fontaneana series jointly edited by the archive and the society by Königshausen & Neumann.
