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Chapter 1 Editionswissenschaft Since Goethe is more or less to German Editionswissenschaft (editorial science ) what Shakespeare is to Anglo-American scholarly editing, the publication of the monumental “Sophien-Ausgabe” of Goethe’s oeuvre (1887–1919) has had a considerable impact on German scholarly editing. As Bodo Plachta elucidates (“German Literature”), this edition re›ected the then prevailing view that considered the last version revised by the author (the so-called Fassung letzter Hand) as his last will. In an important article (“Grundsätze kritischer Ausgaben neuerer deutscher Dichtwerke,” 1921) Georg Witkowski was one of the ‹rst to argue that the apparatus of a critical edition should represent the “growth” of a work of literature (224). Nevertheless, he did regard the editor as the executor of the author’s last will (225). As late as 1964, even Friedrich Beißner, whose Hölderlin edition is the next landmark in the development of German editorial practice, gave little consideration to the rights of the younger Goethe because the changes the older Goethe made to his early poems were regarded not merely as corrections but as improvements (“Editionsmethoden” 95). This opinion corresponds to Beißner’s statement that he never meant to render or reconstruct the real genesis of Hölderlin’s works, but only its ideal growth (“Werkstatt” 260–61). For his edition Beißner based himself on the theoretical guidelines formulated by Reinhold Backmann in 1924. Backmann’s essay (“Die Gestaltung des Apparates”) is a strong plea in favor of a higher assessment of the apparatus, and against the privileged status of the edited text. The function of the apparatus is to reconstruct the textual development by means of the chronological presentation of all versions. Only in this man15 ner can the apparatus acquire the importance it deserves, Backmann argues (638). Friedrich Beißner’s edition of Hölderlin’s works was an important moment in the German editorial tradition because it explicitly shifted the attention from genealogic to genetic research. Hans Zeller calls this edition the start of a second bloom in the neo-Germanic editorial tradition (“Fünfzig” 5). Ever since this controversial Stuttgarter Hölderlin-Ausgabe , the opinions swing between a so-called static and a dynamic editorial approach. The border between these two concepts, however, seems to have shifted in the meantime. While Beißner’s editorial concept was called “dynamic” by Hans Pyritz in 1943,1 it was later classi‹ed by Hans Zeller (“L’Édition génétique”) and Klaus Hurlebusch (“Deutungen”) among the comparatively static methods. In spite of the edition’s emphasis on the genesis of Hölderlin’s works, its concept is still teleological, which is illustrated by means of the organic metaphor of the “ideal growth” directed toward a ‹nal version.2 Not everybody was as enthusiastic about Beißner’s edition as Hans Pyritz. In 1956, Beda Allemann applied a new standard to the edition’s apparatus, arguing that it had to allow the reader to verify the editor’s decisions, and Beißner’s apparatus did not. In order to offer this opportunity to the reader, Beißner should have given a record of all the handwritten evidence (“den handschriftlichen Befund,” Allemann, 82). Hence the plea for a methodical separation of “record and interpretation” [Befund und Deutung], which is the title of an important article by Hans Zeller in the epoch-making collection of essays Texte und Varianten. Zeller argues that the editor is not the executor of the author’s last will and that the will of the author cannot be the leading principle upon which the constitution of the text is based (54). Thus, he radically opposes the tradition of the Sophien-Ausgabe of Goethe’s works, in which it was taken for granted that the ‹nal revised version had to be the basis for the edited text. Zeller’s views were corroborated in the same collection by Siegfried Scheibe. In his essay “Grundprinzipien einer historisch-kritischen Ausgabe ,” Scheibe mentions Ernst Grumach, who showed that Goethe entrusted the ‹nal revision of his printed texts to an assistant. This assistant had far-reaching authority to correct or even change the text whenever he deemed it necessary, which meant that the method of using the ‹nal revised version as the basis for the edition of Goethe’s works became problematical. The self-evidence of this method was questioned by the team of the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften which in 1952 16 / Textual Awareness [3.140.198.43] Project MUSE...

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