Arthur Schnitzler – Journal

More than a hundred years ago, on August 16, 1918, Arthur Schnitzler first noted down the conditions under which his heirs were allowed to publish his journals. Work on the edition began more than forty years ago and was completed almost twenty years ago with the publication of the last volume and the complete index. Immediately afterwards, editors began preparing a digital version which was continually developed but never, to this day, published. After several intermediate versions, the material in its current state is now made available as a "beta version".

The text form follows the printed edition, which was first published between 1981 and 2000 in ten volumes by the Kommission für literarische Gebrauchsformen of the Austrian Academy of Sciences under the lead of Werner Welzig. These volumes are also available in PDF format on the publisher's website.

The digital version differs from the printed one in several places. Corrections and additions, especially concerning the persons covered and the identification of persons were silently incorporated. Person names are now complemented with full birth and death dates and the corresponding places. For the first time, a place register is available. On the other hand, some of the registers from the print edition, such as magazines and publishers, have not been transferred into digital form.

The person largely responsible for the content of the digital version is Peter Michael Braunwarth. Ulrike Czeitschner, Martin Kirnbauer and Martin Anton Müller were involved in curating the digital data. The latter and Laura Untner, the editors of the professional correspondence of Schnitzler, are constantly involved in correcting and expanding the data and functionality. The technical realization was carried out by Peter Andorfer, Andreas Basch, Asil Cetin, Matej Ďurčo, Barbara KrautgartnerKarlheinz Mörth and Martin Anton Müller.

While the editorial principles of the printed journals were largely retained, one alteration was required. During certain time periods, especially in the early years, Schnitzler repeatedly composed chronicles for complete months in addition to entries for single days. Since it is difficult to differentiate between the two types of record, the following procedure was chosen: Chronicle-like journal entries are normally assigned to the day they treat. In those cases where there are two entries for a day, the diary entry is displayed first, followed by the title of the chronicle in square brackets and the chronicle text itself.

The paratexts of the printed edition and the few transcripts from the journals before 1879 were not included in the digital version. They are all available in the PDFs of the publisher.

In addition to the current representation, the data is available on ARCHE, the ACDH-CH's long-term archiving platform, on a daily basis in TEI format. The whole edition can also be obtained via Github (data, application).

The users of the digital diary are invited to share observations, corrections and additions.