Charles Sealsfield´s Letters - Edition and Commentary

Charles Sealsfield (1793-1864),an important german(ophone) novelist of the 19th century, was first a catholic priest, fled from Prague to the USA in 1823, built a new life there as Charles Sealsfield and lived in Switzerland after 1831 where he wrote novels about the New World in the German language. Only after his death was his former identity discovered, which resulted in a lot of biographical research. The Viennese scholar Eduard Castle published a biography in 1952 and an edition of Sealsfield`s letters in 1955. This edition should be suppplanted by a new annotated edition. The shortcomings of Castle`s edition are demonstrated in my formless application where I show a new version of a letter that Castle included in his book without being able to check the original handwriting. It is the goal of this project to complete Sealsfield`s letters through a systematic search, to critically reread and revise those letters that Castle edited by checking the autographs and particularly to make the letters available to scholars through a commentary. Castle considered his edition no more than the second volume of his highly fictionalized Sealsfield biography. But we have to stress Sealsfield`s seminal position within the literary field of the German Vormärz. His international reputation, which in the 1840s even reached the USA, and his hybrid identity make him a phenomenon still relevant today. The new edition also aims to ground him more firmly within an Austrian "Germanistik" that looks beyond Austria, in the sense of interdisciplinary "Austrian Studies" that may place him within various discoursive threads. Methodically the edition will follow the rules established by Ulrich Joost und Albrecht Schöne in their edition of the letters from and to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. It is my goal to have the new edition published within the "supplements" to the reprint of Sealsfield`s collected novels currently published by the Olms company.

Based at the Institut für Germanistik at the University of Vienna and headed by Prof. Wynfrid Kriegleder, but also supported by a host of international scholars, the project aimed at preparing a new critical and annotated edition of Sealsfield letters and related handwritten documents in the form of 2 volumes (text volume and commentary volume) that will be both accessible to a broader public and adhere to stringent editorial standards. In the course of systematic research including the recourse to the original manuscripts (autopsy) and a thorough review of auction catalogs, around 90 unknown letters or related documents were found, some of which amount to a small sensation such as a letter written by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the later emperor Napoléon III, in which he regards Sealsfield as an Austrian spy. The new edition intends to replace the standard edition by Eduard Castle (Der große Unbekannte. Das Leben von Charles Sealsfield (Karl Postl). Briefe und Aktenstücke. Wien: Werner 1955.)