The Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) is the historical-critical edition of all publications, manuscripts, and drafts as well as the correspondence of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. For the first time, work and legacy are documented here in their entirety and in authentic form, such as manuscripts on “German ideology” and “capital”. Furthermore, previously unknown journalistic contributions by…
The task and goal of the Melanchthon-Forschungsstelle; is to complete a comprehensive text-critical and annotated edition of Philipp Melanchthon’s correspondence, comprising approximately 9,750 letters. By rendering these sources accessible in the form of an edition, the Melanchthon-Forschungsstelle is making a fundamental contribution to the research of early modern German and European history.…
The “Neue Schubert-Ausgabe” is a scholarly critical edition of all musical works of Franz Schubert (1797-1828). Its 84 volumes are classified in eight series according to groups of works and include a catalogue of works, documents concerning the biography, and catalogues of sources. Each volume lists the most important sources and interpretations, and is completed by a separate critical report.…
The Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences started with a complete edition of the writings of Immanuel Kant in 1894, which is published in the sections “work”, “correspondence”, “handwritten literary remains” and “lectures” since 1900. The project will complete the edition by reediting or revising the sections “work” and “correspondence”, by filling up essential lacunae and by correcting plenty of…
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) numbers among the central and most influential philosophers of Western intellectual history. Indeed, his works are now considered to be generally fundamental to modern thought’s self-conception. His global influence upon philosophy, literature, anthropology, psychology, and criticism of religion and culture can hardly be underestimated.
Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) is, apart from Max Weber, the most important German sociologist of the 20th century. His social theory and theory of society, continuously developed over a period of 30 years, is internationally outstanding. The extensive body of Luhmann’s literary estate, which the University of Bielefeld was able to acquire in 2010, sheds light on the author and the edifice of his…
Texts from the New Testament are preserved in their Greek original language in approx. 5500 manuscripts. It can be assumed that actually no copy is identical with another. Thus, the most important task of the text research of the New Testament is the reconstruction of the text form, which was the starting point for the transmission.
So far, the science had to use “Große Ausgaben” (big editions)…
During the project period of six years, it is planned on the one hand to publish the complete edition of Albrecht von Haller's reviews (including more than 9'000 in the leading German-language review organ Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen) as a central, but still largely unknown part of his oeuvre. On the other hand, a well-founded selection of approximately 8,000 letters related to the content of…
Orlando di Lasso (1530/1532-1594) was the most important composer of the 16th century. His oeuvre comprises more than 1300 compositions, about 480 prints from the years between 1555 and 1687 confirm his popularity and the unbroken performance tradition long after his death. He worked at the court of the Wittelsbach dukes Albrecht V. and Wilhelm V. (from 1557 as tenor and from 1563 until his death…
In the course of the Middle Ages, papal deeds developed into an important medium of communication and are therefore of particular historical interest. Scientists from all over the world have been working with these writings for more than 100 years. The research is made possible by a project of the Göttingen Academy, which began in 1896 and has been supported by the Pius Foundation since 1931.…
The Arthurian novel 'Parzival' by Wolfram von Eschenbach is one of the most important poems of courtly literature around 1200. 1833's basic edition by Karl Lachmann, at the time an editorial masterpiece, can no longer meet current text-critical requirements, as it only takes into account a fraction of the sources known today and does not sufficiently document the variance of the medieval text. In…
The name of Dionysius the Areopagite refers to the Athenian, who according to Acts 17:34 was converted by St. Paul’s speech on the Areopagus and then followed him. The name was adopted by a prolific unknown author around 500 A.D., with a vast number of writings based on the tremendous influence of his synthesizing of neo-platonic philosophy and Christian theology. The manuscript tradition is a…
The aim of REGESTA IMPERII is to record all documented and historiographically documented activities of the Roman-German kings and emperors from the Carolingians up to Maximilian I. (approx. 751-1519) as well as of selected popes in the form of German “Regesten” (abstracts).
The starting point of the undertaking is strongly connected with the name of the Frankfurt municipal librarian Friedrich…
During his lifetime, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was not only productive as a composer. He also worked literary as an author of dramatic text for his own musictheatrical oevre on the one side and, on the other side, journalistically as “commentator” of his own musical creative work as well as of the events in art, history, philosophy, religion, politics, and society at that time. The oevre - in…
Since 1898 the Law Sources Foundation of the Swiss Lawyers Society edits a collection of law sources which had been created on Swiss territory up to 1798, the Collection of Swiss Law Sources. The Collection contains materials from the early Middle Ages until early modern times (1798). Over 130 volumes, or more than 80'000 pages of source material and comments from all language regions of…
The main focus of the research project SAPERE is to preserve Greek and Latin texts of particular importance for the history of religion, philosophy, and culture of the late antiquity (1st–4th cent. CE). These texts were part of the educational canon until the 19th century but then fell prey to a classicistic perspective on literature. Since then, they have almost been forgotten except those which…
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) is with Fichte and Hegel one of the most important representatives of German Idealism. The Historical-Critical Edition of Schelling’s Works presents Schelling’s works, his posthumous papers, transcripts and letters in three series (I: published works, II: unpublished works and notes, III: Letters from and to Schelling). The edited texts are being…
The Egyptian-Coptic language is the human language with the longest documented lifetime, clocking at 4,500 years prior to its extinction. Its vocabulary reflects the knowledge and worldviews of one of the formative cultures of the ancient world. In order to explore the linguistic and cultural evidence of this historical episteme, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and…
The staff of the project “Turfanforschung” edits central Iranian and old Turkic texts from the Turfanian text corpus (Turfansammlung). The texts of the “Turfansammlung” originated from the Central Asian oases along the silk road and date from the 7th to the 14th century CE. In the year 1902, the former Prussian Academy of Sciences received a considerable amount of texts from an expedition to East…
Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) is one of the most important authors of German in the era of two-state identity. His novels tell of German history in a context far beyond Germany. With his essays and articles, Johnson developed the position of a “public intellectual”. His highly literary correspondence is on an equal footing with the literary work, commenting critically on post-war history in an…