#dla marbach

[literature-on-the-web]

our fanfiction collection

If you found us via Tumblr, chances are you know what fanfiction is. For the DLA, fanfiction offers an opportunity to approach canonical, well-known texts from a new perspective and to make them approachable in turn. Here, a fan retells Hesse’s Demian, there, the friendship between Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is, in fact, a love story. Fanfiction offers an ideal venue for both the study of acts of reading as well as of acts of writing and even concepts of authorship. It is not only creative, derivative, collaborative, and interactive, but also subversive: both love letter to and resistance against the original.

Since 2024, the Literature on the Web project includes efforts to archive fanfiction – to preserve it and make it visible and accessible for research or casual reading. We are specifically interested in archiving fanfiction written on works of literature or prominent persons included in the DLA’s regular archive collections, as well as fic written on topoi that play(ed) a role in German literary history. Your fic doesn’t have to be in German to be interesting to us!

If you think your fanfiction would be a good addition to our archive, contact us via DM!

[literature-on-the-web]

When Readers Become Writers: Fan Fiction in the Archive – Workshop report

On the 20th and 21st of March 2025, we hosted the workshop “Lest ihr noch oder schreibt ihr schon? Fanfiction im Archiv” (“When Readers Become Writers: Fan Fiction in the Archive”) via Zoom. Daniela Rohleder reported on the event for the journal Fandom I Cultures I Research.

Fan fiction transforms, updates, and brings familiar sources to life in a new way through social and inter-active possibilities. But what role does fan fiction play in the German-speaking world? And for which authors and stories of the German-language canon can we find fan fiction? In what ways does fan fiction impact literature and those who work on it? Situated within this field of tensions between canonized literature and transformative fan writing, the workshop “Lest ihr noch oder schreibt ihr schon? Fanfiction im Archiv” aimed to explore the topic with the aid of a number of acclaimed experts. Organized by members of the German Literature Archive Marbach (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, DLA) in co-operation with scholars from Eberhard-Karls-University of Tübingen, the two-day digital event brought together 14 researchers from Germany and abroad. In a virtual setting, they presented their research and discussed and analyzed creative writing from a variety of perspectives and with different approaches.  

>> Want to know more? Read the full article here.

[literature-on-the-web]

On holiday

Dear authors,

in September I will be out of office (out of tumblr as well, that's why) from Wednesday, 3rd to Friday, 26th including. In urgent cases please contact: [email protected]. Greetings from Marbach,

Jochen Walter

[literature-on-the-web]

the "literature on the web" project/ Literatur im Netz

What’s the aim?

The German Literature Archive Marbach is dedicated to collecting and archiving important literary works. Online, we can find literary writings and evidence of their reception around every corner and in many different forms. Thanks to processes of online archiving and screen casting, they can be collected.

Our aim is to preserve these sources as authentically as possible. We want to keep the look and feel of engaging with them even when they become a part of our collection.

What do we collect?

We do not collect all literature born on the web (that would be an absolutely enormous task!). Our general goal is, instead, to document phenomena and new ways of writing of the present day through building corpora.

We have archived fifty sources of electronic literature created between 1994 and 2004. Additionally, we have been collecting literary blogs and online journals since 2008. In 2024, we broadened the scope of our project to include social media, podcasts, the websites of authors, the digital feuilleton, and the genre of fanfiction. In this way, what we do complements the collection of modern German literature at Marbach systematically and we stay abreast of the way contemporary literary life is present in digital spaces.

On our website, we go into greater detail on the way we archive, our criteria and process, our target audience(s), the legal and contractual basis for our project, and how to access the collection. Read more here!