Dr. Ulrich von Bülow, head of the archive department at the German Literature Archive, speaks about the collection and the opportunities for using them.
Following a recommendation from the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, an archive for German literature and intellectual history was founded in Marbach toward the end of the 19th century. Today, the German Literature Archive has become the most important of its kind. Its collections comprise manuscripts, books, pictures and other documents from the late Enlightenment up to the present. Researchers come from all over the world to study more than 1,400 personal archives, including the papers of Hannah Arendt, Gottfried Benn, Paul Celan, Alfred Döblin, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger, Erich Kästner, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Schiller, Arthur Schnitzler and W. G. Sebald.
Sponsored by the University of Notre Dame Department of German and Russian and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies