Introduction 1

Textual Criticism and Theory in Modern German Editing

Hans Walter Gabler

In 1973, a group of textual scholars from Great Britain, the United States, Germany,
Switzerland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium gathered at the Rockefeller
Foundations Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio on Lake Como in northern Italy. Their conference
aimed to explore the significant divergences during the twentieth century in both theory and
practice of textual criticism for modern literatures. The symposium pivoted on the meeting of
the Anglo-American and the German schools of editorial scholarship. It resulted most
immediately in two articles: Fredson Bowerss Remarks on Eclectic Texts, specially
commissioned for the occasion to summarize (Anglo-American) copy-text editing, 1 and Hans
Zellers A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts, 2 now the standard
statement in English outlining the current German position on textual criticism. Another
incentive arose from the prospective survey that Trevor Howard-Hill gave of the potential of
electronic data processing for the development of scholarly editing. 3 In terms both of
methodology and of procedure, the Bellagio encounter thus became, as it happens, the
birthplace of the critical and synoptic edition of James Joyces Ulysses. 4
That seminal occasion, twenty years in the past, is only now coming to fruition. In the
English-speaking world, the accomplished textual scholars of today have been trained in the
Anglo-American ways of editing, and the literary critics, if exposed at all to the subject, have
been reared on the copy-text editions of Shakespeare, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, or
Dryden, or on the range of editions that, like those of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
or Stephen Crane, adapt the |2| Renaissance paradigm. Against this background, propositions
of textual scholarship such as Hans Zellers A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of
Literary Texts, or the critical and synoptic edition of Ulysses, rest on foundations still
inadequately gauged because their premises have remained as yet partly unknown. Anglo-
American scholars and critics will, it is true, be aware that fundamentals of editorial
scholarship have become turbulently controversial. They will, for instance, appreciate that, if
the central orthodoxy of copy-text editing has not been tabooed outright, it has been redirected
(in theory at least) to first principles. As Jerome McGann has shown, 5 these lie in the
historicist orientation of the method rather than in the superadded and idealizing aim of
fulfilling authorial intention. At the present juncture in the Anglo-American discussion it
should be of interest that salient points have already been anticipated by German textual
scholarship. German theory radically holds, for instance, that eclecticism is unsound as a
method, and that authorial intention is unknowable or unstable as a guiding principle for
critical editing. The reader of this volume will find such positions argued in their original
intellectual environment, especially in the essays by Hans Zeller. As a brief selection in
English translation of key German essays on textual scholarship since 1971, the book in its
entirety both remedies a deficiency in information, increasingly felt in the present dynamics of
debate in Anglo-American textual scholarship, and provides a stimulus for intradisciplinary
exchange in editorial studies.
To situate the assumptions of these essays, one might take a lead from Peter
Shillingsburgs statement that the authorial orientation in editing has been for thirty or more
years the dominant one in American scholarly editing, 6 and emphasize that, in contrast, a
text orientation has been correspondingly dominant in Germany. Where the Anglo-American
endeavor has tended to edit the author, the central German concern over the past decades has
Contemporary German Editorial Theory 2

increasingly become to edit the text. German textual scholarship may perhaps not always see
the options in such pointed opposition. The fully fledged German scholarly edition is, to be
sure, an author edition: typically, of the complete works of Goethe and Schiller, or Hlderlin,
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, and Georg Trakl. Such editions of the complete oeuvre texts are
critical editions.
Or are they? By English-language definition, the adjective critical refers to the
establishment of the text, and it strongly implies the editors shaping activity. The editor
constructs the text, which in modern Anglo-American editing tends to mean that he or she
establishes it eclectically |3| from all evidence of authorial text (unrevised and revised)
provided in the authoritative transmission. This procedure is recognizable as a special
modification of the original endeavor of textual criticism as exercised upon classical and
medieval texts to separate authentic text from textual corruption in the transmission. The
German editorial mode derives from the same origins, as is quite explicit from its label for the
critical edition, which is historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Under the conditions of transmission
of classical and medieval texts, to establish an edition text critically requires analyzing the
transmission historically. That is common ground. The difference enters in the mode of
application of the traditional approach to modern texts. What Anglo-American editing has
upheld is the adjective critical, reapplying it to competing authorial variants and their
treatment. The German type of scholarly edition, by contrast, has in the face of modern texts
strengthened the adjective element historical (historisch). Concomitantly, the element
critical (kritisch) is understood to apply not so much to the establishment of the text as to the
analysis the critique of the texts genesis and history.
This has consequences for the conception of both text and apparatus. The aim of a
German edition is not to establish a text in the sense of critically shaping it. An edition
provides as its edited text, rather, a segment or slice from the texts history. In practical terms,
an edition commonly prints, or reprints, an historically defined version of the work as edited
text. Around and toward it, the edition organizes the entire textual history in apparatus form.
License to modify the edited text is restricted to an absolute minimum, emendation
functioning exclusively to remove the textual error, or textual fault (Textfehler), with
debates of definition over what should be allowed as Textfehler. 7
Shaping an edited text to final authorial intention, on the one hand; or presenting it within
an analytically stratified apparatus framework of its history on the other: in terms both of
pragmatics and of theory, it is significant that the progressively tangible presence of the
author on the material scene of textual transmission should have led to such divergent models
of editorial response. The contention that a German scholarly edition edits the text does not
imply that it disregards, let alone denies, the author. On the opposite side, it is of course a
main business of Anglo-American textual scholarship to edit texts. But to characterize how it
goes about that business, and taking a step beyond Shillingsburgs perceptive assessment, one
realizes how all-encompassingly idealistic its author-centricity is: the authors intention is in
the last resort |4| always an idea, of which the real text, unedited or edited, is but a reflection;
and the edited text fulfilling the authors final intentions is, as everyone avows, an ideal text.
The alternative to the ideality of the author, then, is the materiality itself of the text. And
if the ideality of the author is essentially ahistoric, the materiality of the text is manifestly
historic. Again, this is not to argue that real authors do and did not live in history, nor that we
cannot find their intentions manifested. However, what evidence we have of authors and
intentions resides in documents, in the historic materiality of texts. It would seem appropriate,
therefore, to edit texts not so much to epiphanize the author, but rather to render transparent
the text in its material historicity. However, if the latter is the German way, it is also the
Introduction 3

increasing awareness of the author as factor and determinant of the text that has led German
textual scholarship into developing its particular modes of literary editing.
The materiality of a text: a work is likely to materialize initially in plans, notes, outline,
sketches. The German scholarly edition typically comprises a section of Paralipomena to
present such heterogeneous, sometimes extrinsic, and oftentimes fragmentary raw material. In
subsequent first drafts, the work then enters into its textuality proper. Throughout the
twentieth century, authorial draft manuscripts have been subject to intense research. The urge
to analyze and the desire to present them have led to complex developments of method, as
well as to significant advances in theory, in German textual scholarship. A comparable
communal scholarly energy to that expended in the English-speaking countries on analytic
bibliography, and its harnessing to textual criticism and scholarly editing, has in the German
editorial field been devoted to the study of the manuscript in terms of textual genesis, and to
the analysis of the types of authorial work processes for which draft situations are
paradigmatic. The sui generis edition of working drafts and manuscripts (the Handschriften-
edition) has become a central concern, indeed sometimes an autonomous objective, of
German scholarly editing. With its elaborate methodology, its stringency and subtlety of
representing a manuscripts textual layering and topography of its writing, of establishing and
indicating temporality, absolute and relative chronology, sequence, logic, and correlation of
corrections and revisions, the German Handschriftenedition has left the diplomatic edition
of old far behind. Even endeavors, say, like Harrison Hayfords Billy Budd, 8 let alone the
widely admired transcript of the manuscript/typescript of |5| T. S. Eliots Waste Land worked
over by Ezra Pound, 9 look elementary to the trained eye of the German Handschriften editor.
Where works emerge through stages of text and revision, the process may be contained in
one manuscript. But it may equally spread over a sequence or cluster of documents a
sequence where the advance is linear from one document to the next, a cluster where the
process of composition moves to and fro, forward and backward, over a group of draft
manuscripts. Editorially, this raises the question of an orientation text to correlate the draft
stages in the presentation. The principles by which to determine such an orientation text are
those that in the edition of published works likewise dictate the choice and manner of
presentation of the edited text. Just as a version materially defined, say, as the text of a
specific fair copy or printing in a history of transmission serves as an orientation text in the
scholarly edition of a work exclusively or predominantly transmitted in published print, so the
orientation text of a Handschriftenedition must be a version by analogous historical
determinants: an integral textual structure at a given point of development in the writing, and
definable in time by document or document state.
Increasingly, however, the orientation text, especially in the manuscript edition, has come
to be recognized as but an option, and perhaps a misleading editorial device. Editing the
materiality of the text historically raises the awareness that textual historicity resides not only
in versional states, but also in compositional processes, and therefore equally in achieved and
unachieved writing. Draft manuscripts are a field of action for writing under either aspect, and
the writing activity to which they bear witness does not always tend toward closure in a
finished and transmittable state. The writing may remain open, whether for resumption or for
ultimate abandonment. Under such circumstances, the extrapolation of an orientation text
would suggest a fictitious achievement. Rather, the true historicity of an unachieved text is
pure process. The scholarly edition of the poetry of Georg Heym is based on this insight, and
its draft manuscript renderings are apparatus-only editions. 10 Similarly, the Roter Stern
edition of Hlderlins poetry, presenting solely genetic transcriptions of the manuscripts, often
supplemented by the visual copy of facsimiles, 11 follows a rationale that explicitly opposes
Contemporary German Editorial Theory 4

the teleology of achievement implied in Friedrich Beiners standard genetic Hlderlin

edition. 12
Once published, a text may be called achieved. Even in a public text resulting from the
private writing enterprise, however, the achieved |6| version may prove temporary. The act of
publication does not bar continuation of the act(s) of writing. The special attention devoted in
German textual scholarship to the analysis and editing of draft manuscripts has also sharpened
awareness of textual processes beyond the act and moment of first publication. Editing the
text means also to attend to those later acts and to present them editorially in their dynamic
quality over against the textual stasis or closure of any given version as materialized in
identifiable books and printings. Post-publication processes of textual change clearly have
their authorial dimension. The author, sensitive to the public text and to the responses it
publicly elicits, affected even perhaps in his or her identity and self-image by the public text,
may wish to alter it. 13 The author has every authority to do so, and seen in this way, post-
publication textual changes are very much a matter of intention. Yet perceiving them under
the perspective of intention may lead to privileging the result of textual change over the
process of such change. Without denying the legitimacy of editing what the author intended,
one may still recognize a wider option in editing what the author did and this, broadly
speaking, is the German editorial approach. Under its dynamically historic premise, it also
holds out larger possibilities for editorial response once a text has gone public. For, after all,
what the author did is only one of many factors of textual change; such change may equally
be effected by the manifold cultural and social causes of production, collaboration,
censorship, or reader response. To be discriminatingly analytical of these is a basic
requirement of textual scholarship that is, to endeavor to distinguish authorial changes from,
say, misprints, miscorrections, typographical constrictions, book design semiotics, censorship
cuts, or readership (mis)guidance. To be specifically committed in textual scholarship and
editing to the textual process, however, provides a method not only for discriminating by
exclusion, but also of discriminating and including multiple-natured textual changes in the
editorial representation of the text.
This introduction cannot explain fully how German scholarly editions put into practice
their objective of editing the text. A reminder must suffice of their most obvious feature,
namely that the texts they present take on forms that the general reader is unaccustomed to
encountering. They are not linear, clear-reading texts. Even on the two-dimensional page of a
book they are multidimensional, contriving to be so through integral apparatus. The integral
apparatus is a mode of text presentation incorporating variance into invariant context.
Concep|7|tually, the idea of the integral apparatus whatever its actual design has gone
beyond the notion of the apparatus as a textual and typographical adjunct to the edited text of
a scholarly edition. Instead, the integral apparatus is, or represents, the text itself as multi-
layered, multiple-factored, and multiply generated. It is the text that literary theory today
recognizes as emanating from authorial writing and from socially and culturally conditioned
transmission.
By its historicist allegiance, the German scholarly edition endeavors to do justice to the
text so conceived. It is aimed less at the reader than at the user of the edition. It bases its claim
to being a scholarly edition on how well it encodes the text in the history of its material
writing and transmission by an appropriate and adequate apparatus format.

The history of editorial scholarship in Germany in the twentieth century is repeatedly

rehearsed in the essays that follow: 14 How it emerged from the penumbra of classical and
medieval editing; how it developed an awareness of the distinction between divergences of
Introduction 5

transmission (Lesarten or readings) and textual changes by authors in composition and

revision (Varianten or variants); how it abandoned the guidance of the authors final redaction
(Ausgabe letzter Hand), and with it, the orientation toward authorial intention; and how, in
consummation, it discovered the genetic dimension of the literary work and developed
principles and practices for editing texts in their compositional and revisional development.
Such a history may be structured, obviously, as much in terms of landmark editions as of the
scholarly discourse surrounding these. 15 If the watershed in the history of scholarly editions of
German literature was Friedrich Beiners Groe Stuttgarter Ausgabe of the works of
Friedrich Hlderlin that, heralding the genetic approach, began to appear in 1943, it is
probably true to say that a new intensity, systematization, and theoretical awareness entered
textual criticism and editing in the volume Texte und Varianten: Probleme ihrer Edition und
Interpretation (Texts and variants: Problems in editing and interpreting them), which
appeared in 1971, edited by Gunter Martens and Hans Zeller. 16 This volume forms the point
of departure of our present selection.
Of the twenty-one essays that make up Texte und Varianten, at least five, even after more
than two decades, remain of central importance for the most recent development of the
discipline in both theory and practice. Of these, we offer three in an English version: Hans
Zellers Record and Interpretation, and the essays by Miroslav ervenka and Elisa|8|beth
Hpker-Herberg. In defining terms and articulating precepts, sketching in theoretical
backgrounds and systematizing procedures, these three pieces complement each other to map
out a coherent field for textual criticism. Hans Zellers pairing of Befund and Deutung
record and interpretation has become as universal to the German discourse on editorial
matters as the Gregian substantives and accidentals have for their wholly different Anglo-
American context. Yet the comparable terminological currency itself highlights a significant
difference in the framing of approaches. Whereas the Gregian terms essentially serve a
pragmatic classification, Zellers paired concepts concern more theoretically the very nature
of recorded texts and of the text-critical and editorial engagement with them. Similarly,
Zellers notion of the textual fault, far from being merely pragmatic, emanates from his
structuralist theorizing of the concept of text. The structuralist stance as such, with Jan
Mukaovsks theory of the stylistic valency of variants behind it, is the basis of Miroslav
ervenkas essay, which turns on the significance of publication in the history of a text.
Structuralist theory must be recognized throughout as a main foundation in the German
discussion, as must similarly the distinction between private and public modes of a text (albeit
not always in accordance with the ontological status that ervenka attributes to the act of
publication itself). In the third essay from the 1971 volume, Elisabeth Hpker-Herberg puts in
perspective the practical enterprise of editing. Grounded upon her own experience in editing
Klopstocks epic poem Der Messias, and confronting the diversity of presentational solutions
found in the genetic editions of Hlderlin, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, and Trakl, her abstract
reasoning demonstrates the degree of reflection practical editing requires in a highly
conceptualized and theorized environment, while her extensive exemplification illustrates the
end toward which such discipline tends.
To take the bearings of the discussion that has gone forward since Texte und Varianten, a
sense of the import of at least two further essays from that volume is necessary. Siegfried
Scheibes Zu einigen Grundprinzipien einer historisch-kritischen Ausgabe (On some
fundamental principles for historical-critical editions), 17 in hierarchizing a set of principles
and systematizing a terminology to govern such editions, lays down the orthodoxies of
German editorial scholarship. Scheibes classification of editions as reading editions, study
editions, and historical-critical editions, his demands for completeness and exhaustiveness of
Contemporary German Editorial Theory 6

the historical-critical edition in text, apparatus, documentation, and |9| commentary, and his
canon of terms to define work, text, version, and edited text; paralipomenon and witness,
authorial manuscript, setting copy, and printing; the authorial work process, authorization,
text constitution, and textual fault provide a catechism for editors and have become a point
of departure for the subsequent conceptual development and scholarly exchange of ideas.
Gunter Martenss Textdynamik und Edition (Text dynamics and editing), 18 by contrast,
is the 1971 volumes focal essay of innovative thought in textual scholarship so much so
that its exclusion from our present volume is justifiable only because Martenss ideas and
propositions at a yet maturer advance are here represented in two of his later essays.
Martenss allegiances are complex. Leaving no doubt that the historicist stance is his, too, he
advances by tempering and modifying Scheibes radical and materially bound historicism
through hermeneutics. When Martens speaks of the critical-historical edition 19 the reversal
in the adjectives is not fortuitous, and the mode of criticism implied goes beyond Zellers
sense of the editors interpretative engagement with the textual records and their evidence. It
is the response and discourse of literary criticism that Martens sees implicated from the outset
in the dynamics of the historical process of textual evolution. The reception-oriented
argument returns in the later 1975 essay (fifth in our selection), and the structuralist concept
of text, shared with Zeller, is eventually not only reinforced but transcended in Martenss
essay of 1989 (penultimate in this collection). Of greatest significance in the original
propositions of 1971 are the ideas and editorial consequences surrounding the notion of text
dynamics. The central contention is that, since the editorial enterprise is one of transforming a
textual process into scholarly presentation in print, not the edited text but rather the apparatus
constitutes the core of an edition. This relativizes, above all, the concept of the version and
severs its ties to the material substratum of a given document. Text becomes conceivable as
logically independent of documents; and the object of editorial presentation, if not a synoptic
continuum of a dynamic textual process and progress, becomes a successive series of text
stages (Textstufen, often witnessed by more than one document), work phases
(Arbeitsphasen), starts (Anstze), and orders of correction (Korrekturfolgen). 20 The edition
from which these notions were developed, in a critical dialogue of approach and methodology
with Hans Zellers edition of the poetry of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Walther Killy and
Hans Szklenars edition of the works and letters of |10| Georg Trakl, 21 is the edition of Georg
Heyms unpublished poetry manuscripts (which was then still in the making), 22 from which
extensive illustrations are drawn.
Hans Zellers Structure and Genesis in Editing: On German and Anglo-American
Textual Criticism of 1975, fourth in our present selection, is an important companion piece
to his Studies in Bibliography article published in the same year. It accomplishes two things.
First, Zeller introduces (from the Bellagio encounter) the tenets of Anglo-American editorial
scholarship to a German audience. Under this head, he may seem to rehearse the familiar for
readers of this volume. Yet the unfamiliar perspective, even to the questioning of first
principles, will become obvious under closer attention. From reviewing the results of Anglo-
American editorial practice, Zeller comes here to reject categorically the procedures of
eclectic editing and the guiding notion of fulfilling authorial intention. Secondly, he employs
the occasion of contrasting the approaches to deepen his own rationale for textual criticism by
sharpening its governing concepts of variant, version, and text, and expanding upon their
procedural significance. Conspicuously again, the notions of authorization and textual fault
come to the fore.
From its juxtaposition to Zellers essay even in the special number of the journal LiLi,
Zeitschrift fr Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, in which they both originally appeared,
Introduction 7

we have next imported Gunter Martenss (De)Constructing Texts by Editing: Reflections on

the Receptional Significance of Textual Apparatuses. Upholding the proximity, we
emphasize for this volume the double impulse toward renewal in the German discussion:
Zellers innovating rationalizations of the editorial orthodoxies, and Martenss innovative
exploration of the function of textual scholarship in literary criticism. Henning Boetiuss
Preliminary Reflections on a Generative Theory of Editing, from the same 1975 issue of
LiLi, appears innovative in yet another direction. Taking his cues beyond linguistics (this time
the Chomskyan variety) from cybernetics, he roughs out a model for comprehending genetic
processes. The sometimes unfamiliar terminology not only conjoins the perspectives of
production and reception but also incorporates reception, qua authorial control reading, in the
very acts and processes of production itself. Such an understanding has its affinities with
Martenss pervasive orientation toward reception, and the increased emphasis on writing
further developed in his 1989 essay. Admittedly, Boetiuss procedural demands remain open-
ended. What they entail in terms of apparatus |11| design is not specified in the essay, nor has
Boetius or anyone else to date publicly set forth a genetic apparatus model on cybernetic
principles. (Dynamic hypertext may prove the requisite tool to realize such a model.) The
general projections nonetheless illustrate how multifaceted, and imaginatively speculative, has
been the response in German editorial theory to the materiality of texts, even as both, the texts
and their materiality, have been newly perceived in their nature.
It follows that the text text as concept has become increasingly the focus of theoretical
concern. This is reflected in the third group of selections for our volume. After Zeller and
Martens, we introduce with Siegfried Scheibe the third main voice from the German debate of
the past couple of decades. This may seem paradoxical, since Scheibes stance is no doubt the
most conscientiously conservative. Yet if this is so, it is in itself representative, showing as it
does that the conservative positions partake of the re-evaluative movement. Scheibes
contributions Theoretical Problems of the Authorization and Constitution of Texts (1990,
1991) and On the Editorial Problem of the Text (1982) illustrate the incentives for
reassessing the received positions inherent in the novel openings of theory. The first of these
essays second in order of appearance in the German original attempts to codify afresh the
pragmatics of constituting and establishing the text in a historical-critical edition. It does so
mainly by reconsidering the concept of authorization, traditionally central to German
empiricist text-critical principles. As received, it is decidedly author centered, and that
orientation is not abandoned in Scheibes urge of now extending to all authorial writing the
notion formerly reserved for documents of textual finality (such as accomplished manuscripts,
setting copies, and printings). Especially in the temporal relativities that this introduces, the
influences of the disciplines experience and insistent theorizing of the genesis of texts and of
their process character may be felt. An implicit and, it would seem, not yet firmly grasped
shift is also noticeable from a document-oriented application to a conceiving of
authorization in terms of text. The questions to which this leads, namely the problematics of
the textual fault, as well as the advocacy of a principle of the early version in versional
editing, were prepared for, and are in our order of the essays taken up, with reiterated
attention to the complexities of authorization, in On the Editorial Problem of the Text.
This essay circumscribes, and prescribes, to the fullest available extent the rules of versional
editing in German textual scholarship. 23
|12| By traditional custom in editorial studies, Scheibes argument, close to practical
issues and solutions, is empirically pragmatic. Its wider theoretical background, save for the
assertion of an overall historicist position, remains implicit. Gunter Martens, by contrast,
explicitly frames the question of his very title in terms of theory: What Is a Text? Attempts at
Contemporary German Editorial Theory 8

Defining a Central Concept in Editorial Theory. In specifically taking his cue from Scheibes
On the Editorial Problem of the Text, he spells out the theoretical foundations in Russian
formalism of Scheibes assumptions and joins them to his own Prague structuralist
allegiances. This gives him a platform from which to proceed, via communication theory and
semiology, to a post-structural position which conceives of text as dialectical and dialogistic,
as both criture and crit, writing and the written, that is, as at once process and product. The
editorial consequences he circumscribes are a maturation and fulfillment of the propositions
first raised in his own Textdynamik und Edition in Texte und Varianten of 1971. If at this
point we harken back to our own introductory contention that German editorial scholarship is
oriented toward editing the text (versus editing the author), the juxtaposition in our selection
of Scheibes and Martenss essays, both problematizing the very concept of text, should serve
to clarify that German perspectives maintain two distinct attitudes toward what it means to
edit the text. One, represented by Scheibe (and essentially shared by Zeller), organizes an
edition hierarchically around the Edited Text. The other, mainly postulated by Martens
(whose views draw support from ervenkas as well as, mediately, Boetiuss theorizings),
reverses the viewpoint and sees the apparatus at the center of a scholarly edition. However,
Martens, in What Is a Text? moves yet further. He suggests a synthesis of the apparent
opposites in a comprehensive conception of the scope and potential of scholarly editing that
answers to the recognized double nature of the literary text. In essence, Gunter Martens moves
German editorial theory, framed since Texte und Varianten on precepts of structuralism, into
the post-structuralist realm.
Our selection concludes not altogether without misgivings on account of the highly
technical nature of an editorial display that, couched in an unfamiliar metalanguage, presents
a foreign-language text with a practical example. Gerhard Seidel, for more than two decades
the proponent of a genetic edition of the works of Bertolt Brecht, gives a model edition for
one poem designed to break down previously rigid divisions of presentation. While upholding
the conventions of the integral appara|13|tus mode so that indeed the apparatus portions of
his article may stand as an illustration, in this selection, of the complexity of apparatus
characteristic in German editions he attempts to combine the symbolic foreshortenings of
the conventional editorial formulas with the editors verbalized commentary into one editorial
discourse.
The background of Seidels working model of 1982 is his monograph Die Funktions- und
Gegenstandsbedingtheit der Edition (The applicational and object functions of [scholarly]
editing), published in East Berlin in 1970. These prolegomena to a critical Brecht edition have
for legal and political reasons entirely beyond the control of scholarship to this day not
been implemented. Seidels study has nonetheless importantly contributed to the German
debate of the past two decades, as attested not least by its republication in a revised and
augmented edition in the West under the title Bertolt Brecht: Arbeitsweise und Edition. Das
literarische Werk als Proze. 24 Klaus Kanzog has similarly offered prolegomena to an edition
of the works of Heinrich von Kleist: Prolegomena zu einer historisch-kritischen Ausgabe der
Werke Heinrich von Kleists: Theorie und Praxis einer modernen Klassiker-Edition. 25 The
modernity apostrophized in Kanzogs subtitle lies in the application of genetic principles to
the projected undertaking. Seidels and Kanzogs volumes have in common not only in-depth
arguments of principle. They both also offer ample illustrations of model editorial solutions
for textual problem situations. This should recommend them to anyone who, even though less
than fluently conversant with German, wishes to sample the German editorial approach in its
modes of practical realization.
A like service on a more comprehensive scale is naturally provided by the several editions
Introduction 9

themselves of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German authors that have appeared, or have
commenced to appear, in recent years, and particularly by the Editorial Reports that
customarily go with them, whether as integral sections of the editions, or as (for editions still
in progress) separate publications. A useful list of such statements is contained in Klaus
Kanzogs introductory handbook Einfhrung in die Editionsphilologie der neueren deutschen
Literatur. 26 After Siegfried Scheibe et al., Vom Umgang mit Editionen, 27 and Herbert Kraft,
Editionsphilologie, 28 Kanzogs is the third recent handbook introduction to editing. All aimed
at the users of scholarly editions, they differ in the level and degree of generalization.
Kanzogs Einfhrung stands out not only by the exceptional attention it gives to analytic
bibliography and to Anglo-American methodology, but above all by the |14| plenitude and
detail of its examples of editorial problems and solutions from eighteenth- to twentieth-
century German literature.

Notes
1
Fredson Bowers, Remarks on Eclectic Texts, Proof 4 (1974): 13-58; reprinted in Fredson Bowers, Essays in
Bibliography, Text, and Editing (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), 488-528.
2
Hans Zeller, A New Approach to the Critical Constitution of Literary Texts, Studies in Bibliography 28
(1975): 231-64.
3
A published version of that survey remarkably forward-looking considering its date is T. H. Howard-Hill,
A Practical Scheme for Editing Critical Texts with the Aid of the Computer, Proof 3 (1973): 335-56.
4
James Joyce, Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe
and Claus Melchior, 3 vols. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1984;21986).
5
Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1983).
6
Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age. (Athens and London: University of Georgia
Press, 1986), 31.
7
See especially the contributions by Zeller and Scheibe.
8
Herman Melville, Billy Budd: Sailor (An Inside Narrative), reading text and genetic text, edited from the
manuscript by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts Jr. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1962).
9
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of
Ezra Pound. (London: Faber and Faber, 1971).
10
A referent, as work in progress, of the German discussion for over two decades, the edition has now finally
become available: Georg Heym, Gedichte 19101912, historisch-kritische Ausgabe aller Texte in genetischer
Darstellung, ed. Gnter Dammann, Gunter Martens, and Karl Ludwig Schneider, 2 vols. (Tbingen: Niemeyer,
1993).
11
On the notion, and potential, of visual copy in editing, see Hans Walter Gabler, On Textual Criticism and
Editing: The Case of Joyces Ulysses, in Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein
and Ralph G. Williams. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 195224, esp. 212-15, and, in further
detail, What Ulysses Requires, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 87 (1993), 187-248.
12
[Friedrich] Hlderlin, Smtliche Werke, Groe Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed. Friedrich Beiner et al., 8 vols.
(Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1943-85); Friedrich Hlderlin, Smtliche Werke: Frankfurter Ausgabe, historisch-
kritische Ausgabe, ed. D. E. Sattler, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1975).
13
On the author, and the authors self-image, in the crosscurrents of inten|15|tion, public response, and
production, see Klaus Hurlebusch, Conceptualisations for Procedures of Authorship, Studies in Bibliography
41 (1988): 100-135, esp. 108ff., 112, 124ff.
14
A systematic survey in English, moreover, is Bodo Plachtas contribution, Scholarly Editing of German
Literature, in Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research, ed. David Greetham (New York: MLA, 1996).
15
We trace the scholarly discourse. At the same time, the editions cited in our text and notes stand out as
testimony to a German editorial achievement spanning the last fifty years.
16
Gunter Martens and Hans Zeller, eds., Texte und Varianten: Probleme ihrer Edition und Interpretation.
(Munich: Beck, 1971).
17
Texte und Varianten, 1-44.
Contemporary German Editorial Theory 10

18
Texte und Varianten, 165-201.
19
Textdynamik und Edition, 168-69.
20
It should be noted here that, curiously, German usage does not make a clear terminological distinction between
corrections and revisions. The term correction in all essays that follow indicates an authorial activity and
therefore generally means revision by received Anglo-American usage.
21
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Smtliche Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Hans Zeller und Alfred Zch,
15 vols. (Bern: Benteli, 1958); Georg Trakl, Dichtungen und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Walther
Killy und Hans Szklenar, 2 vols. (Salzburg: Otto Mller, 1969; augmented second edition 1987).
22
See above, note 10.
23
To the reader versed in Anglo-American textual scholarship, correspondences with recent advances such as
Donald Reimans concept of versioning suggest themselves. Yet if it is just to say that in the Anglo-American
debate encounters with the German school of textual criticism have not been sought (see Hans Walter Gabler,
Unsought Encounters, in Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory, ed. Philip Cohen.
[Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991], 152-66), the reverse is equally true: German textual
scholarship, beyond taking marginal note of analytic bibliography, has remained oblivious of Anglo-American
developments.
24
Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977.
25
Munich: Hanser, 1970. A Kleist edition answering to Kanzogs Prolegomena has again not yet begun to
appear. Nor, however, has an edition as yet come from a contending scholar, Hans Joachim Kreutzer, who, in
1976, set out his proposals as berlieferung und Edition: Textkritische und editorische Probleme, dargestellt am
Beispiel einer historisch-kritischen Kleist-Ausgabe. (Transmission and editing: Text-critical and editorial
problems exemplified for a historical-critical Kleist edition) (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1976 Beihefte zum
Euphorion, 7). The volume, as further advertised on the title page, includes a contribution by Klaus Kanzog,
giving him the opportunity to respond to critique of his Prolegomena. Meanwhile, yet other plans for a critical
Kleist edition from a team of younger scholars seem to be shaping. One discerns, in this instance as also, for
example, in Dieter Sattlers explicit |16| counterbid against Beiners Hlderlin edition, that editorial controversy
has by no means been lacking in Germany. Kleist, Hlderlin; Stephen Crane, Yeats, Joyce: finesse and fierce
academic strife seem indigenous to the editorial discipline.
26
Grundlagen der Germanistik, 31 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1991).
27
Berlin [East]: Akademie-Verlag, 1988.
28
Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990.

[From: Contemporary German Editorial Theory. edited by Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein,
and Gillian Borland Pierce. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995, 1-16; page numbers
between vertical slashes |2| etc. indicate the beginning of the original pages. The volume assembles
the following essays:
Hans Walter Gabler: Introduction: "Textual Criticism and Theory in Modern German Editing."
Hans Zeller: "Record and Interpretation: Analysis and Documentation as Goal and Method of
Editing."
Miroslav ervenka: "Textual Criticism and Semiotics."
Elisabeth Hpker-Herberg: "Reflections on the Synoptic Mode of Presenting Variants, with an
Example from Klopstocks Messias."
Hans Zeller: "Structure and Genesis in Editing: On German and Anglo-American Textual Criticism."
Gunter Martens: "(De)Constructing Texts by Editing: Reflections on the Receptional Significance of
Textual Apparatuses."
Henning Boetius: "Preliminary Reflections on a Generative Theory of Editing."
Siegfried Scheibe: "Theoretical Problems of the Authorization and Constitution of Texts."
Siegfried Scheibe: "On the Editorial Problem of the Text."
Gunter Martens: "What Is a Text? Attempts at Defining a Central Concept in Editorial Theory."
Gerhard Seidel: "Changing Intention in the Process of Writing: A Poem by Bertolt Brecht on Karl
Kraus in a Historical-Critical Edition."]