"Retro-editing": The edition of an edition of the Karl Kraus legal papers

1 Introduction: Historical context

While the Austrian Karl Kraus (1874–1936)  is most commonly perceived as a satirist, writer, and editor of the magazine Die Fackel, his intensive preoccupation with justice was often observed.

Although Kraus’ attitude towards the courts in the Habsburg period had been predominantly critical, the constitutional reform of the Austrian Republic in 1919 and the abolition of death penalty marked a decisive break for the author. He especially welcomed the reform of the Press Law of 1922, which marked the beginning of a growing fondness for litigation. In the same year, Oskar Samek became his lawyer. In the course of the following 15 years (until Kraus’ death), they were involved in over 200 court actions together. 

Despite of Kraus’ commitment to the law, the influence legal proceedings had on his satire and the other way round was barely thoroughly researched – which was on the one hand due to the fact that cultural and literary historians often shy away from the interpretation of legal documents. Only Reinhard Merkel, a professor of criminal law, attempted to understand the connection of “Strafrecht und Satire” in Kraus’ Fackel from a jurisprudential point of view.[1] The project described in this paper aims to bridge this gap by (re-)editing the papers documenting Kraus’ and Samek’s actions and making them available in an open access / open data / open source digital edition.

2 Initial position and starting point

The material documenting Kraus’ and Samek’s court actions is held by the Vienna City Library. This corpus consists of roughly 8000 sheets of paper. Luckily, transcription is only a minor part of the project members’ tasks: In 1995, Hermann Böhm published the records of cases from the Karl Kraus papers as a ‘mixed edition’ (“Mischedition”) in four volumes[2] (of roughly 300 pages each). However, Böhm made a number of editorial decisions which are today out of date and not suited for a digital format, which is why a new edition of this material has become a desideratum among Kraus researchers as well as a wider research community interested in historical legal documents.

While Böhm did a tremendous service to the research community by making the previously unpublished records available in book format for the first time, the aim of his edition was to create a laywo/man friendly version of the texts in order to serve as large a readership as possible. This had a number of consequences. For instance, Böhm chose to leave out addresses, dates, salutes, and signatures in his transcriptions of the letters included in the corpus. For numerous other document types (e.g. summons, formal announcements of court dates, requests), Böhm only included metadata but no transcriptions; he wrote short introductions for each court action which include information on hearing dates etc., but did not include the transcriptions of the summons that provided him with this information. In the case of accompanying material (such as denigrative newspaper articles Kraus took to court), Böhm followed an inconsistent approach and transcribed it in some cases, but not in others, obviously making the choices of what to include on the basis of a personal rating of the documents’ significance. Additionally, the move of the material to the manuscript department and the rearrangement of the entire Kraus collection in the course of the Karl Kraus Online project[3] lead to the discovery of further documents. 

Since 2012, Katharina Prager (who is also the lead of the project described in this paper) has worked with the Kraus collection at the Vienna City Library in order to build the platform Karl Kraus Online. There, facsimiles of the entire Kraus legal papers collection are presented. However, the searchability of the documents is limited as no full text is available. While Karl Kraus Online offers structuring that helps users navigate through the material presented, the vocabularies and other metadata structures used by the platform do not follow standards commonly applied in digital humanities projects. Therefore, one of the tasks of the project described here is to build on the structuring work done in the Karl Kraus Online project and transforming its filters and metadata into structured vocabularies and making them compatible with other standards such as the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM)[4], and linking them to other sources already available in digital form.

3 Digital resources to enrich the edition

Karl Kraus Online is not (or only rudimentarily) interconnected with other digital resources. The platform provides metadata for the documents presented (date, place,  type of document, persons involved, institutions involved), but apart from the person data (which are connected to the records of the German National Library’s authority file for the German speaking area Gemeinsame Normdatei GND[5]) none of them are connected to structured digital data resources (e.g. places are named as places, but do not contain geo information). In the digital edition, we will therefore build on the work done in Karl Kraus Online and use the data already collected by enriching, expanding, and interconnecting it with other resources (e.g. GeoNames).

As suggested by the project title „Intertextuality in the Legal Papers of Karl Kraus“, the underlying research question that is driving the development of the digital edition described focuses on the interconnections of Kraus’ legal papers with other texts. Therefore, we will connect our project with the Austrian National Library’s historical newspaper digitization project (AustriaN Newspapers Online – ANNO[6]), which offers a IIIF interface. 

The most interesting resource for learning about Kraus’ way of thinking and mode of (literary) argumentation is his aforementioned magazine Die Fackel, which was a periodical published, edited, and (at the time of the court actions) exclusively authored by Kraus. The author did not only act legally against his offenders, but also made their offenses the topic of his own articles and writings. Investigating similarities, differences and interconnections between his Fackel articles and the applications, the correspondences with (potential and actual) defendants, and of course the rulings by the courts will therefore give the most meaningful insights into questions of intertextuality. Again, the project team can rely on a valuable resource already available in digital form: Die Fackel was fully digitized, edited and made available online by the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ institute Austrian Academy Corpus AAC in 2007.[7] Thanks to the Online Fackel, we will not only be able to investigate intertextualities between the legal papers and the Fackel, but also to make them available to users of our edition in a structured form. 

4 Conclusion and outlook

As the project is still in full progress (it began in September 2018 and will run until August 2021), the structure of the interface that will present the edition (to be) created is not yet fully developed. However, a number of basic decisions have already been made. Most importantly, we have agreed on two initial entry points for users: One possibility will be to enter directly into “expert view”, another to browse and read the Böhm version of the text. Users that choose the Böhm entry point will encounter a more laywo/man friendly interface, but still have the possibility to switch to expert view if they wish to learn more about the documents. The expert view will enable a more in-depth analysis of the material, providing facsimiles, transcriptions, and commentary (including extensive metadata) in a joint presentation. Most importantly, the metadata to be attached to the documents will allow us to offer complex filter functions and search functionalities, which will offer a valuable addition to the full text search enabled by the transcriptions.

At the end of the project, we hope that we will have created a digital edition that does not only exploit the current means digital technology is able to offer, but also joins together the accomplishments of Böhm’s edition, Karl Kraus Online, ANNO, and the Fackel Online and benefits the Kraus community as well as other fields of research by not only connecting these resources, but extending them.

REFERENCES

[1] Reinhard Merkel: Strafrecht und Satire im Werk von Karl Kraus. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998. 

[2] Karl Kraus contra … Die Prozeßakten der Kanzlei Oskar Samek in der Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek. Ed. Hermann Böhm. Vol 1-4, Vienna 1995.

[3] Katharina Prager (ed.): Karl Kraus Online. https://www.kraus.wienbibliothek.at/ 

[4] CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM). http://www.cidoc-crm.org/ 

[5] Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: Gemeinsame Normdatei GND. http://www.dnb.de/DE/Standardisierung/GND/gnd_node.html 

[6] Österreichische Nationalbibliothek: ANNO – AustriaN Newspapers Online. http://anno.onb.ac.at/ 

[7] Austrian Academy Corpus AAC: Die Fackel Gate. http://corpus1.aac.ac.at/fackel/