Annotated Hybrid Edition of the Correspondence Gottfried Benn – Nele Poul Sørensen, divorced Topsøe, née Benn (1930–1956)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stephan Kraft
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 506498965

This project seeks to produce an annotated hybrid edition of the correspondence between Gottfried Benn and his daughter Nele Poul Sørensen, divorced Topsøe, née Benn, which they exchanged between 1930 and Benn’s death in 1956. The complete available correspondence consists of 230 letters and numerous other accompanying enclosures. Along with his correspondence with F.W. Oelze, these letters are without question Benn’s most important written exchange and presumably his last yet unedited large-scale correspondence. In the spring of 1923, after the death of her mother, Benn gave his daughter into the care of Danish foster parents at the early age of seven, and a tense long-distance relationship between father and daughter began. This relationship will be traced on the basis of this correspondence. Benn’s letters are often of high literary quality and contain numerous references to his works.The printed version, which is intended to appeal to a broader literary public, will be published like our previous projects by a cooperation between Klett-Cotta and Wallstein. In addition to the meticulously edited letters, it will contain detailed commentary, selected accompanying enclosures, numerous illustrations, and an index. The digital edition, which will be strongly research-orientated, will be published later open access on the document server EdView at the German Literature Archive in Marbach. In addition to the contents of the printed edition, it will contain digitalised versions of each individual letter and its accompanying enclosures, side by side with their transcriptions. A further advantage of this online edition is that it can be linked with other correspondences on the platform, as well as their potential future supplements, thereby enabling digital research to be conducted across numerous text corpora which can be interlinked in a host of different ways.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants