Genetic Editing and Textual History. The Case of Goethe’s Faust

In his lecture, Gerrit Brüning introduces the key concepts and features of the Faust edition, which is published in an advanced beta stage (beta.faustedition.net), and nearing completion. The genesis of Goethe’s Faust tragedy spans a period of about 60 years. Individual stages of its conceptual and textual history have survived in hundreds of manuscripts with more than 2000 written pages. The Faust edition gives access to this material, enabling the user to find all witnesses for every single passage of the work and to explore images and transcriptions in an intuitive way. Started in 2009, the project played an important role in the development of genetic or documentary TEI XML encoding.

Gerrit Brüning is a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University of Frankfurt. He received his PhD in German Studies and has been affiliated to the Faust edition from its beginnings in 2009. Currently he is working on a new critically established text of Goethe’s Faust II, which will appear in print this autumn.