Productive Reading. Thomas Mann's Legacy Library
I. Brief description
Thomas Mann's legacy library in the Thomas Mann Archive of the ETH-Bibliothek Zurich comprises more than 4000 media and represents an important part of the estate (more information can be found here). In addition to its importance as a working tool for the Nobel laureate in literature, the library itself has a chequered history, which is reflected in its material diversity. In the course of his life, Thomas Mann owned thousands of books, which he received from publishers and author friends or acquired himself. The fact that he read many of them attentively "in pencil" gives his library a very special value. On the basis of the annotations and underlinings and the marginalia, which are just as productive from a scholarly point of view, research can reconstruct Thomas Mann's readings and often even reconstruct the writing process. According to Claudine Moulin, the study of reading and editing traces, as they can be found in Thomas Mann's estate library, is now a "blossoming discipline in an overarching cultural-historical-philological field of tension between philology, cultural studies and book and library studies".[1] Claudine Moulin: Am Rande der Blätter. Gebrauchsspuren, Glossen und Annotationen in Handschriften und Büchern aus kulturhistorischer Perspektive, in: Autorenbibliotheken, Bibliothèques d’auteurs, Biblioteche d’autore, Bibliotecas d’autur, Quarto. Zeitschrift des Schweizerischen Literaturarchivs 30/31 (2010), p. 19–26, p. 20.[1] Today, authors' private libraries are considered and treated as significant components of estates, and many, including Thomas Mann's estate library, still await detailed evaluation. This desideratum is being addressed by the National Fund project Productive Reading, which will begin in February 2016 at the Thomas Mann Archive and at the Chair of Literary and Cultural Studies of Prof. Dr. Andreas Kilcher: The aim is to digitally record and index the pen traces, i.e. the marginalia, ownership notes and dedications in Thomas Mann's estate library. The annotated books from Mann's library will be digitised, the marginalia transcribed, and the reading and editing traces recorded and made searchable using up-to-date technical resources specially adapted to the project's needs. The digital copies and transcriptions are then available in the reading room of the Thomas Mann Archive and complement the archive database tma_online, which was launched in 2015.
The Productive Reading project aims to provide information about Mann's sources and at the same time add value to the poetics of knowledge by demonstrating how Mann transformed his sources through reading. The connection between the reading and writing process in Thomas Mann's work is thus made vividly comprehensible. The result is a distillation of the author's library that records, describes and makes available for the first time many previously unnoticed traces of the pen. In addition, the library holdings will be protected from further physical wear and tear through this new accessibility on the screen: Digitisation also sees itself as a contribution to the protection of cultural assets.
Of particular interest are the marginalia left by Thomas Mann in his books. As a materialised trace of library use, the marginalia stands paradigmatically for the intersection of production and reception that this project focuses on. The project began in spring 2016 with the recording of the editing traces in the bequest library. Since then, assistants have been completely digitising the annotated volumes in ETH's own digitisation centre. The digitised material is subjected to OCR full text recognition. The finished digitised material and the associated information and metadata are recorded using software solutions that are already in use at the ETH-Bibliothek and have been adapted for the Productive Reading project.
Based on the e-raracall_made and e-manuscriptacall_made platforms, a multifunctional digital presentation form of the annotated books was developed in collaboration with the ETH-Bibliothek: Users of the Thomas Mann Archive not only have access to digital copies of the annotated texts in the reading room, but can also specifically search the transcribed marginalia and other editing traces. The project benefits not only from the institutional support of the ETH-Bibliothek and its state-of-the-art digitisation centre, but also from synergy effects with the recently completed digitisation project TMA_online.
II. Research Projects
The digital indexing of Thomas Mann's legacy library is supplemented by research projects that give the project an additional literary-scientific and knowledge-historical component.
In a theoretically and methodologically oriented dissertation project, Manuel Bamert is pursuing the fundamental question of the literary-scientific cognitive potential of the reading traces in Thomas Mann's private library. The first part of the dissertation on phenomenology critically examines the terms and definitions of previous research on reading traces and contrasts them with its own terminology and typology. The second part on epistemology shows how and on the basis of which reading processes such reading traces arise. The third part on poetology asks about the significance of these phenomena for the study of writing processes as well as the status of reading traces within the oeuvre as a whole - not least against the background of Thomas Mann's estate consciousness.
Anke Jaspers reconstructs the eventful history of Thomas Mann's estate library from its first constitution in Munich in 1905 until today. The processes of expropriation by the National Socialists in 1933, the emigration of the Mann family and the moves from Switzerland to the USA and back again have not only decimated the library's holdings, but also left their mark on it. Many a book was temporarily not in Thomas Mann's possession and only came back into his hands after the Second World War or could even be recovered through the efforts of the Thomas Mann Archive. As a result, the collection and its order remained in a constant state of flux. By means of specimen histories, the project on the provenance of the estate library traces these processes and in doing so reveals collection and processing practices that are reflected in the materiality of the estate library.
In an exemplary study, Martina Schönbächler deals with the fundamental thesis that Thomas Mann is to be understood as a 'reading writer'. Accordingly, her dissertation works closely with the materials of Mann's estate library. In terms of content, the focus is on two concepts of character, whose diachronic development since the early stories of Mann's complete works, on the one hand, and whose discursive synchronic interweaving in the third volume of Mann's novel tetralogy Joseph und seine Brüder, on the other, are examined. The workbooks and materials on the Joseph tetralogy in particular have been preserved almost entirely in the 'real' library, despite the eventful history of the collection, while the textual references of the early work lead into the 'virtual' library to be reconstructed intertextually.
[1] Claudine Moulin: Am Rande der Blätter. Gebrauchsspuren, Glossen und Annotationen in Handschriften und Büchern aus kulturhistorischer Perspektive, in: Autorenbibliotheken, Bibliothèques d’auteurs, Biblioteche d’autore, Bibliotecas d’autur, Quarto. Zeitschrift des Schweizerischen Literaturarchivs 30/31 (2010), p. 19–26, p. 20.