This project edits the correspondences of Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) with fellow writers and puts them on a website in proximity to the digital diary of Schnitzler. This allows access to updated correspondences of those that need revision (the one with Hugo von Hofmannsthal) or were incompletely edited (the one with Richard Beer-Hofmann) as well as so far unpublished (eg Lou Andreas-Salomé, Max Burckhard, Robert Adam). In addition to the already mentioned are among others correspondences with over 30 colleagues such as Peter Altenberg, Hermann Bahr, Franz Blei, Wilhelm Bölsche, Georg Brandes, Gerhart Hauptmann, Albert Ehrenstein, Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, Laura Marholm, Bertha von Suttner, and Frank Wedekind.
The research community and interested public is provided with the professional and friendly network of the Viennese writer, including facsimiles, transcriptions and various indices, such as persons, works, local and organisational registers as well as sender and receiver locations. Schnitzler as a writer is one of the protagonists of the culture of letters so that editing his correspondence in addition to questions on biography and work can be suitable as a digital project exemplary for the cultural-scientific research of transnational networks and correspondence research.
The project is located at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This allows for a close interaction of the correspondences with the digital diary of Arthur Schnitzler, currently developed at the same research location. The technical design of the project is deliberately pragmatic: the collection of the letters follows established international standards and the data is provided with an open copyright license. This makes it possible for all the project's services to be extended and brought into new contexts without restriction by third parties.
